And hell, after the sexy beast they call the X-32 I can't see why you wouldn't want their designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32
Direct link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...
> Several injured passengers have been evacuated from the scene and transported to local hospitals.
Edit: The BBC is reporting local police as saying: "There appears to be no survivors" https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c8d1r3m8z92t?post=asset%3A8731...
Source: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1456931
Some aircraft allow fuel dumps but it is a slow process and done at higher elevation relative to the ground.
Large jets can usually dump fuel but this is something that takes time. It's sometimes used in less urgent situations where the plane can still fly safely, like a landing gear malfunction or single engine failure.
he must've been thrown out at just the right angle to not hit too much along the way...
Edit: Looks like 1 guy from the plane made it.
Assuming this is accurate I would think this is a terrible idea in a large, heavy aircraft (and I realize they might not have been heavy for this flight).
When I was flying I would regularly hear airliners refuse intersection departures past a few hundred feet from the end of the runway due to company SOPs.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...
I'm very disappointed that in India this aspect is being ignored. It should stimulate local/state/central govt to solve the slum, urban garbage etc kind of problems.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/12/whistleblower-ra...
Initial ADS-B data from flight #AI171 shows that the aircraft reached a maximum barometric altitude of 625 feet (airport altitude is about 200 feet) and then it started to descend with an vertical speed of -475 feet per minute.
https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1933091913567285366?t=MhY...
This also means that the flight was fully fueled and it's sadly unlikely there will be any survivors. There are also casualties on the ground.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...
Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.
But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.
The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.
Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it
One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle back around.
The passengers could just take turns going out and pushing.
But it is somehow implied that the context of the comment is normal driving conditions.
Perhaps that comment could be reworded like:
>When driving on a highway, while not being pursued by the police, on planet Earth, with a road temperature below 200C, and not driving behind a van transporting nails with an open door that's dropping them on the road, why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?
That way people could get a better sense of what it is about.
Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
Aborting above V1 is heavily discouraged because usually there's a strong risk of running off the end of the runway. Of course, if you lose both engines above V1, you're really in trouble and left without much choice.
But we don't know what happened with this flight so nothing I've said here should be taken as indicative of whatever went wrong in this case. It's purely information.
[0] Which depends on many factors including the type of aircraft, loading, weather conditions, state of the runway surface - for example, wet, or iced - etc., and needs to be calculated afresh for every take off.
An airliner in the US did it and the pilot was praised for making that hard decision. Everyone walked I think. I forget which flight.
One a plane reaches v1 during takeoff, it can lose an engine and still takeoff.
It an engine was lost before v1, the takeoff would be aborted.
Here is an Airbus doing just that.
There are many factors at play and things are complicated by unexpected failures.
Thank you for the video that demonstrates a pilot aware in advance of planned "engine failure" can cope with such an event in scheduled test conditions.
The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.
EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.
There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.
At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.
EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.
Everyone in the formula 1 subreddit uses jargon, none of them are F1 drivers.
The statement I made:
> Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
is about having _no_ thrust power during take off.
The other statement I made acknowledged that test pilots in planned and scheduled clear weather conditions often test aircraft with mock engine failures, then pointed out that this is very different to an unexpected failure during non test flights.
Yes, sometimes these things work out alright (as per your example), other times not so much.
Landing sans power is landing with no thrust (no functioning engine).
Completing a take off with no thrust isn't possible unless the craft is a glider, a hot balloon, or a ballistic launch .. taking off with a single engine is not "taking off sans power".
[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]
Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).
There was this very famous double bird strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
There certainly have been bird strikes that disabled all engines.
The most well known double-bird-strike incident is probably the one where Sully landed a plane on the Hudson River.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Takeoff...
-edit: ok, everyone had the same thought, haha -
What? It happens multiple times a year. They made a movie about a famous incident (US Airways Flight 1549). There's even events with four engine strike (Eastern Air Lines Flight 375).
So far this year, it's happened at least twice resulting in engine failure.
Jan - Air New Zealand NZ207 - aborted take off following dual bird strikes and both engines damaged.
~~Mar - Ryanair FR 4102 - dual bird strikes on landing resulting in injuries and hull loss.~~
Before that, in December 2024, Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed on landing following dual bird strikes, resulting in the loss of all PAX.
These aren't as rare as you believe they are.
Selection bias
The lower the barrier to entry of the subject matter the lower quality the people discussing it. This crap is like the Kardashians for white nerds with stem degrees.
The people with the requisite dozen brain cells to common sense realize these problems are complex and keep their mouths shut.
But in the video of the plane taking off and crashing, there's no clear, obvious, or tell-tale "poof" of bird turning into exhaust as there often is in bird strikes.
That doesn't rule it out.
Any time after it’s too late to abort takeoff.
Pilots should be able to “regain full control of the aeroplane without attaining a dangerous flight condition in the event of a sudden and complete failure of the critical engine…at each take-off flap setting at the lowest speed recommended for initial steady climb with all engines operating after takeoff…” [1].
[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/136694/en 25.143(b)(1)
It's _exactly_ the kind of comment that deserves to be downvoted here.
It's curiosity, it's learning, it's looking for an explanation.
That's exactly the kind of comment that deserves to be here.
>[...] who doesn't have any relevant expertise,
Is that a requirement to comment on this thread?
Do you fulfill that requirement you brought in?
If I'm wrong, then apologies to the OP.
Yes, I've been on this website quite a long time, unfortunately.
Is that the topic of this thread?
So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2. The vast majority of airplane accidents happen at takeoff or landings, if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore.
Also I would venture that 99% of comments on public forums like this are from people without expertise. My expertise in this space is a curiosity about planes for a few decades, taking some actual flying lessons, and being generally interested in aviation to go to airshows, watch youtube content from pilots, etc. I probably have about the same aviation knowledge as an average HN person.
Unironically, you're probably way more qualified than most of the people here throwing rubbish at you.
A classic on places like this.
Impossible to answer until we know the cause. If it was independent powerplant failures, then yes. If it was e.g. fuel contamination, pilots improperly shutting down the engine, some other crap failing, then no.
Speaking as someone with aerospace engineering and GA pilot experience.
It's pretty clear what the guy is inquiring about.
Speaking as someone without aerospace engineering or GA pilot experience. My only relevant experience here is being able to read.
Double bird strikes are “independent powerplant failures.”
"4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn though (we'll probably get to the point in future where four large engines are superior in efficiency to two of today's engines, but two large engines to that latest design will still be more efficient than four smaller ones...)
With turbines, yes, for fundamental reasons. With electric motors, on the other hand, perhaps not, though not particularly relevant to a long-haul route like AMD-LON.
(I get to write about arrayed space thrusters in the day job too, but again, fundamentally different physics and goals...)
Apologies!
Smaller turbofan engines are less efficient than larger ones. This is because they have a lower bypass ratio - thrust generated by turning the big fan over the thrust generated by combustion.
So expect even bigger engines.
Larger jet engines are more fuel efficient than smaller ones, because larger diameters allow for more bypass air and therefore more fuel efficiency [1]. It is a function of size and a lot of the engineering goes into materials and designs to be able to increase size and maintain strength. So you simply can't make 4 engines that are as efficient as 2 large ones, and that is compounded by the significant additional weight (and drag) of the duplicated engine parts and mounting structures.
>if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore
Everything comes with tradeoffs. Adding more engines mean more complexity, more maintenance, more chance of single engine failures, etc. You don't want to introduce more failure modes than what you are trying to fix. The move to two engines for large aircraft and the evolution of ETOPS (Extended Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) involved a lot of people considering a lot of scenarios. I can guarantee the "why not 4 engines" question has been studied extensively.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/why-do-jet-engines-keep-getting-lar...
We won't know until we have all the details and the exact cause of the shutdown.
(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ewa7R20MA
Lufthansa 747-8 after engine failure:
*We're not an emergency.*
Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.
PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.
I think it's more that they needed the prestige of having the biggest planes, offering a whole bedroom with shower etc. It goes well with their ultra luxury image.
If it's just about seats that can fly smaller ones with the benefit that they can operate more frequently and thus attract more transit passengers looking for a good connection. That's their main market.
An A380 is quite a hassle because most airports can't even handle one.
Horrifying that it came down in a residential area with almost all its fuel still on board though. The aftermath is beyond belief.
What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.
I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.
Here's a list of plane crashes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incide...
Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.
It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.
People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).
Not all crashes are created equal. A 10 person Cessna disappearing near Nome, Alaska !== mid-air collision above the Potomac.
If you're looking at US news sources, I don't think you need to resort to clickbait and fearmongering to justify the increased focus.
On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.
In 2012, in a rush to break the news, WGN 9 in Chicago mistook the set of Chicago Fire tv show for a real crash.
https://q1057.com/news-anchor-mistakes-movie-set-for-plane-c...
https://metro.co.uk/2012/12/01/plane-crash-telly-as-chicago-...
Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.
Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.
We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.
> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]
Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.
The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.
I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.
Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.
I remember long ago he said he would not report on crashes but that's what people want so no blame..
He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.
They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.
The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.
So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.
Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.
Media isn't free, especially well produced media that's taken it's time to research.
I really don't know what you are talking about.
Also as an engineer you can actually learn a lot about technical and social failures.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a digital option?
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.
Basically the French new outlets are some of the most subsidized on the planet.
Just to give you some quick figures, in 2010, the French government gave news outlets 1.8B euros in subsidies and in 2012 another 1.2B euros. There is no mention of the subsidies in the years after that but there is no reason to think that these would have shrunk significantly.
That's not even mentioning the special tax breaks that journalists get and the fact that most news outlets are staffed by union members.
Knowing that most unions are leaning left politically, it is fair to say that the coverage of the news by these outlets will be tainted by their political ideology. It's just human nature.
All of this to say that in light of all this, it is best to treat any French news outlet as basically an arm of the government that will never go against the interests of the their real owners, the politicians, unions and the billionaires.
Le Monde is but one of these outlets but nevertheless they take the money just like the other ones.
If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.
Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.
Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.
For those who haven’t encountered Admiral Cloudberg, this is a good opportunity: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/
The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.
How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?
It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.
I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.
Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.
We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.
When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)
It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.
Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.
Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_%28book%29
In Holland we just watch the news at 6 or 8pm (at least for those who still do that) which is very factual. Or we read nu.nl or nos.nl which don't really have screaming clickbaity headlines unless some shit really hit a fan. Which is really rare. I prefer nos.nl because nu.nl has too much celebrity news for me.
But we don't have any of that weird "Watch this NOW or get left behind!!" FOMO bait I see when I tune up CNN.
It probably helps that NOS is publicly funded so they have no incentive to maximise "engagement". Their job is just to report the news in a clean way.
Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.
Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.
I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.
I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.
News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.
If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.
Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.
Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.
Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?
The answer is that you don't.
Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...
Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.
The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
If something is truly pressing, you’ll hear about it from friends or coworkers.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
Not to mention how gross cleaning yourself with dry tissue is.
I think many people in countries like the US or northern Europe wouldn't even know what it's for when they see one :)
John Tuld: If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking.
—Margin Call (2011)
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
I just unsubscribed from the digital edition. A neoliberal and globalization bias in overall tone.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
Available in many languages
Le Monde is owned by a French billionaire: https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/democracy-in-france-de...
It comes out daily.
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
“news” detox is as important as a healthy or non existent interaction with social media.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...
It might just be sensational and of course they repeat it, just like they'd send on a chain letter/email etc. back in the day.
Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement.
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)
Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.
And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.
TBD on the cause, but loss of engines for some reason seems to be the case.
I do agree that a lot of info comes out first week that isn't all right. I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos.
Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.
The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.
It’s not. It’s one video of unknown quality and relevance, picked somewhat randomly out of all the other available videos and data, the most relevant of which aren’t publicly available.
> Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself
It’s the usual emotional coping through baseless speculation. There are healthier ways to deal with uncertainty amidst tragedy.
We know it called mayday and then lost communication. It also stopped transmitting GPS data.
Looking at this it likely lost all electric power. The electric power comes from generators driven by the turbines.
If you lose both turbines you lose electricity. You also lose the hydraulic system so you can not get in the gear or change flaps.
Occam's razor checks out.
By the way, the age old rule is "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" in that order of priority. So it could be they just had their hands full with the Aviate part.
I guess they're just for the time until the RAT kicks in. Or to augment it.
Ps there's also the APU, a small turbine in the tail for generating electricity.
There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.
most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.
When fuel is dumped, it's at high altitude where it just evaporates.
Short haul jets can't do it, but their max takeoff weight is around their max landing weight, so it's fine. For long haul, it's not the same.
This is true but irrelevant to this crash. Most commercial jets are smaller (A320, 737 etc) and can't dump fuel.
Long-haul jets like the 787 do have the capability.
https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/comme...
It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.
On the professional pilot forums the consensus guess is inadvertent flap retraction, instead of gear retraction, leading to inability to climb.
Not at takeoff weight with the gear down, this sentence is incorrect.
They did this because they are parasites that value a few $$ over human life.
Everyone knows it after the MAX.
Everyone involved in MAX (including engineerings) should get a live in prison without pardon.
Sincerely, A fellow engineer
One week ?
Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait.
The investigators have access to more than you or any other armchair investigator or journalist will ever do.
For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.
I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.
So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.
Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AirSafetyInstitute/videos
For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.
In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.
That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.
And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.
Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.
Clear skies, no LiveATC but reports of single Mayday call, gear out but no flaps and no control inputs visible in the grainy video. Something has to go really catastrophically wrong with a modern jetliner for that to happen, like the very dense flock of birds in Korea with the 737 a couple of months back.
The very short intersection takeoff seems like a good hint (and terrible practice), but all gears and engines look kinda OK from the outside. If they‘d scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, there’d probably be some visible damage, or at least some gears sheared off.
EDIT:
Fully agree with the speculation in light of tragedy comments, but aviation is a bit of a special case. The reason it’s so safe is because an awful lot of people immediately start looking into potential reasons and then spend years getting to the bottom of it. The initial speculation is like an exercise: what could have happened? What if I’m in that situation, and need to act now, without knowing much of anything? If you do that a couple of dozen or hundred times throughout your life, it really builds a foundation for when an actual emergency ever happens to you.
It’s a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you won’t talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: they‘re mentally walking through a potential emergency and what they‘d then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, there‘s muscle memory, 10000x over.
EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.
That being said, in the video I saw, the aircraft was already going too slow to realistically recover. And all you would get at that point is just an extended duration of glide which at best would let you find a less populated area to crash into.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ahmedabad/comments/1l9i1ga/om_shant...
Although it's possible I am just missing from the video. You are right that the sound is quite distinct and can be clearly heard in the video.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ95qKj...
edit: here you might possibly see it on the right, a very tiny blurry thing
source: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...
From the video of the runway it also seems like the aircraft didn't do a short takeoff (ADS-B location data is always crappy on the ground in my experience so this is entirely unsurprising).
There was a "smoke cloud" from behind the left engine which could also have just been a dust cloud right after rotation.
The flaps allegedly could be at only 5° (which is why they're so hard to spot) because of the runway inclination.
The mystery thickens...
So I am not sure what you are trying to say here, sorry.
About all they could probably do was to try to get the engines going.
Large airports with heavy traffic sometimes have operational constraints to send a plane out ahead of another from some intersection, but if the ADSB data is correct, taking off from half the available runway in a fully loaded 787 isn’t a good idea. You just give up a ton of margin for errors.
When you are taking off, you have a short portion of the runway which you can use to abort the takeoff depending on failures, but that portion can become even shorter depending on the length of the runway.
Usually the first part of takeoff you would abort for almost any reason, and the second part you would only abort in a serious emergency, once you reach a certain point you simply cannot afford to abort because you will not stop in time to crash into whatever is at the end of the runway at which point you must take-off even if you are going to immediately request an emergency landing afterwards.
So if you are heavily loaded, with a lot of people on board, and you do an intersection takeoff, you are taking a risk that if you made a mistake or something goes wrong you will not have the ability to safely recover. That's why it's a terrible practice in this case. All it does is save a little bit of time which would be spent taxiing to the actual start of the runway.
I imagine in a while we will all be able to read the investigation reports, since the aircraft crashed shortly after take-off the black box recorder should contain all the information we need to figure out most of what happened including possibly the reasoning for the decision to make an intersection takeoff.
Was flying as a passenger on a really small airline (8 seater plane, Green Air) out of San Jose in Costa Rica. We got cleared for takeoff ahead of a United 737, at most 500 feet into the humongous runway for that plane. Yet the pilots still put in the 2 minute effort to taxi back to the beginning of the runway, even though they could have easily taken off from where we entered it. Don’t know if it was their protocol or the pilots decision, but I will trust this airline for a very long time.
Now, obviously there's a discussion to be had about where the line is and what should and shouldn't be standard operating procedure but there's basically no safety improvement to have even a fully loaded 757 or Learjet or whatever drag it's butt to the very end of a 15000ft runway.
A pilot may be trying to scoot out of there ASAP because he knows based on the radio and who's where that's gonna make everyone else's jobs a little easier. An airport is run by professionals all of whom are trying to make things run smooth. It's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from a school or Starbucks parking lot.
This runway was over 2 miles long. If you are in a smaller commuter prop plane or small jet, you don't need half that space for the takeoff. You call up ATC and they give you the option of taking off at an intersection now, or being #15 in line behind the heavies, its totally fine to do that if you are within the operating margins of the aircraft. The pilots have already done the math to know exactly how long of a runway they need for the worst case scenario (rejected takeoff just below V1), so if they know that they need 5k feet worst case scenario, and are offered an intersection takeoff with 7k feet of an 11k foot runway, there is already pretty big margin built in.
The thing to remember is that the aviation community and manufacturers have decided that once a jet is past a certain speed, you are committed to taking off and climbing out no matter what is going on. There is no circumstance where airliners will go beyond that speed and then try to reject the takeoff, and land back on that same runway.
As far as fuel, you might be distressed to know that you rarely fly with full tanks. They typically fly with the amount of fuel their route uses for the load they have + a margin for diversion. This is both a cost savings measure, as well as an operational concern (for example at Denver during a hot summer day, a lot of planes can't be loaded to maximum weight and still be able to do a rejected takeoff)
> We are continuing to process data from receiver sources individually. Additional processing confirms #AI171 departed using the full length of Runway 23 at Ahmedabad. RWY 23 is 11,499 feet long. The aircraft backtracked to the end of the runway before beginning its take off roll.
That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.
> but no flaps and no control inputs visible
Standard Dreamliner operating procedure, you take off at flaps 10 or 5, they are barely visible from the outside, see many random videos of 787s takeoffs on Youtube like this:
Can't edit anymore, but the general gist of catastrophic failure needed to prevent a 787 from climbing out of this situation still holds.
Oh fascinating! I would not have considered that but it totally makes sense.
Sumeet Sabharwal – Captain - 8800+ flying hours Clive Kunder – First Officer 1 - 1100+ flying hours
Cabin Crew
Aparna Mahadik – Cabin Executive-1 Shradha Dhavan – Cabin Executive-2 Deepak Pathak Irfan Shaikh Lamnunthem Singson Maithili Patil Manisha Thapa
This was crew of AI171. Next time you're on a flight please take a moment to thank the pilots, CISF staff and cabin crew for all they do to keep us safe.
Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. Considering how many planes are currently in the sky at this very moment, this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.
I can read too. I added a comment with a number. You don't know my intent, this is your interpretation.
Besides, 2018/19 was a steep outlier with the 737 MAX crashes. This is why these got widespread attention and have been discussed down to the last detail for years.
It is quite an intuition to decide to leave a plane in such a moment. He just escaped death and is now aggressively attacked for saying something potentially relevant.
(There may also be security rules like requiring continuing passengers to disembark with their hand luggage before reboarding. I don't know, it's 15+ years since I took a flight like this.)
I'm a system engineer - the hardware kind, not the more familiar network kind - and that is my job.
No. No no no. This is wrong, mistaken thinking.
A minimum standard of operations and attention to detail must be adhered to for high consequence / life critical endeavors and that behavior (culture?) must be enforced at all levels throughout the operation.
Ignore this heuristic at your peril - as either a consumer of these services or a provider who must demand high performance from your workforce.
Remember: flight attendants have (rarely exercised) critical health and life safety responsibilities. What messages do they internalize if this is the fourth flight in a row the coffee maker has been cracked and out of order ?
The organizations doing aircraft maintenance are always handling life-critical stuff. You don’t need a weird test to see if they’re paying attention.
It’s not like this stuff is just decided ad hoc and planes fly with broken IFE equipment because of bad culture. This stuff is worked out by engineers and regulators. There’s a list of stuff that needs to be working for the plane to be allowed to take off. If something on that list isn’t working, you don’t fly, even though the plane may be perfectly capable of it. And I guarantee the IFE equipment isn’t on that list.
Frequently broken passenger amenities indicate bad customer service but it doesn’t reflect on safety.
Airlines are large and heavily regulated organizations, and passenger amenities (once successfully certified) might just not be in the loop for mandatory maintenance cycles and certifications.
Maintenance of IFE units vs. avionics or the airframe itself might as well be performed by completely different contractors, maintenance crews etc.
I wouldn't expect two parallel cultures in a org, one for safety, one for entertainment systems.
Correlation just helps lead you to common causes.
Not a cause but and indicator.
You there to watch a old movie in 720p or to go somewhere?
Any discussion about causes is going to be pure speculation right now. It's too early. But the Wiki article is pretty good to get an overview. Some interesting discussion on its talk page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Air_India_Flight_171
A plane at takeoff is pressurized, and that pressure holds the doors closed, as well as the physical locks. You cannot open it.
Don't believe random reddit comments. Average people know less than nothing about planes.
Speaking of random people knowing less than nothing: I believed that at takeoff and landing, planes were slightly overpressurized to increase airframe rigidity. I think I got that impression from a very old pilot, so either it used to be true or it was never true and I'm just wrong.
This person probably did not bail out of the plane in order to survive, but maybe you COULD open the doors at takeoff and landing, not that you want to.
Additional edit: I've actually flown a few times while running the barometer on my phone for funzies. I might be able to find a log of data to confirm or deny my mistaken belief! It's fun to do because you can see the pressurization increase signalling that the pilots are preparing for descent even before they tell you!
Apparently the pilot radioed "Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift!” 11 secs after takeoff.
It would seem to fit with a bird strike on both engines. Or contaminated fuel I guess. The stuff about flaps seems irrelevant.
Quite likely this and Jeju Air crash in Korea and Sully landing in the Hudson were all caused by bird strike taking out both engines.
There's a large plume that looks like smoke to me looks like smoke (could be dust/sand being blown away but I wouldn't think you'd see that much from a busy runway) visible off the left side of the runway. The plane is obscured by that structure when it happens but it looks like it's created at the same time that the plane is leaving the ground.
It looks like the plane stops accelerating completely at that same moment without any change in orientation which, in my head, looks like both engines suffered total failure at the same time.
From my limited knowledge (mostly from Mentour Pilot YT videos), that seems consistent with what you'd see if the plane flew through a large flock of birds that are spread out enough that both engines would be hit at the same time.
Again, purely speculation on my part based solely on what I see in this 1 video.
He died of “suicide” suspiciously right after. I hope Boeing gets investigated for failure after failure after failure, and crashes it has caused recently.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...
>Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, says he faced retaliation, including threats and exclusion from meetings, after raising concerns over issues including a gap between parts of the fuselage of the 787.
That particular issue you quote, was only given as a single example
I mixed him with the other Boeing Whistleblower John Barnett Thanks !
Still wild speculation, but at least a high proportion of it informed.
The US flys significantly more than any country in the world and operates the most Boeing airplanes including the 737 and 737 Max, yet there hasn't been a single major accident like this and the Max crashes in the US.
Are these planes not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes as much as in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
> American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after lifting off the runway at Chicago O'Hare Airport [...] The accident was attributed to improper maintenance procedures. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
> American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, just after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo. The first officer's overuse of the rudder in response to wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines 747 was cited as cause. All 260 people on board, as well as five people on the ground, died from the crash
I'm going to downvote you now.
The second, in 2001, remains the last major accident in the US.
Not to say there isn't something there to dive into with data and some countries are safer than others to fly. And definitely some airlines than others.
Id rather look at it in the lens of "is this flight I am booking safe enough" over "US is safer than Non-US"
And why is it always Boeing planes?
I suppose US Airways 1549 wasn't American, then. I wonder what the 'US' in the name was for, then. If the bird strike had happened earlier in the flight where the plane would've had less altitude and speed, a very similar result to AI171 could've happened.
Or more recently, I suppose DCA isn't in the US either, and PSA Airlines isn't American.
This comment is subliminal racism disguised as thoughtful 'are these pilots not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes', when the corrupt cesspool that is the US somehow churned out the disaster of an aeroplane system that was MCAS.
What a bell-end of a commenter.
Goes through the usual speculations. However it mentions interesting the region has a high number of bird strikes.
I guess he was just lucky to be in a bit sticking out rather than crushed?
m4tthumphrey•22h ago
hnpolicestate•22h ago
aaldrick•22h ago
AHTERIX5000•22h ago
ihuk•22h ago
Simon_O_Rourke•22h ago
Guessing it's either a foreign object ingested into both engines, probably a bird strike, or fuel starvation.
ihuk•22h ago
And here's a YouTube video showing a Ram Air Turbine (RAT) being deployed on a 787 for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBCGf50Trc&t=69s
Simon_O_Rourke•21h ago
ihuk•19h ago
ExoticPearTree•20h ago
consp•20h ago
ihuk•19h ago
It could be the blurry object under the fuselage, just to the right of the left engine.
lormayna•22h ago
captn3m0•22h ago
uncircle•22h ago
arandomusername•20h ago
thatloststudent•19h ago
[1] - https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-modi-responds-to-it...
potato3732842•19h ago
gsky•21h ago
lormayna•21h ago
xeromal•20h ago
account42•18h ago
snickerbockers•21h ago
pjc50•20h ago
snickerbockers•21h ago
Although TBH it also seems like a failure of city planning, aren't most major airports outside of the limits of the city they're associated with because of stuff like this? I know most of them don't have anywhere safe to attempt an emergency landing immediately after leaving the runway but at least there aren't a bunch of homes and office buildings.
navigate8310•21h ago
placardloop•19h ago
snickerbockers•17h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i....
I'm sure this is an airport most of the people on this site are familiar with but just in case you aren't, it's on reclaimed land in the San Francisco bay.
placardloop•17h ago
Ar-Curunir•16h ago
snickerbockers•14h ago
dghlsakjg•15h ago
dghlsakjg•15h ago
However, there are plenty of airports in major cities and built up areas (in both developed and developing countries), and I have never heard of avoiding building in areas due to the (remote) possibility of crashes.
roncesvalles•13h ago