Air India plane crash: Why were its wing flaps fully retracted when it departed?

India Today

Air India Flight 171, headed from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick Airport, crashed shortly after take-off on the 12th of June. The aircraft, a Boeing 787, had 242 passengers and crew on board. A video has emerged showing the aircraft's undercarriage lowered and flaps retracted, which is unusual for take-off. Investigators are focusing on this video and the black box to understand the cause of the crash.

Transcript

00:00Air India flight 171 was headed from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick Airport on

00:05the 12th of June when it crashed shortly after takeoff. It's one of India's worst

00:11aviation incidents. What do we know about this tragedy so far? Well the aircraft

00:20was taking off from Sardar Patel Airport in Ahmedabad. This airport has a

00:29runway with a length of three and a half meters. The Boeing 787 took off. It hit an

00:40altitude of about 190 meters and suddenly there was a mayday call from the cockpit

00:47with the pilots desperately radioed an SOS and then the plane descended and

00:55crashed in a fireball here just two kilometers away from the runway. There

01:05were 242 passengers and crew on board. Now there's a video that's emerged of this

01:13tragic accident just a few minutes after the aircraft took off and that video has

01:19something very unusual. The aircraft

01:32has its undercarriage lowered and its flaps retracted. Now this is very interesting

01:46because as a pilot who studied this footage explained to us an aircraft that

01:52was taking off and was at 190 meters would normally have these flaps lowered

01:59because an aircraft needs to generate that kind of lift with the flaps lowered and

02:05these this is a very critical position. But in the video that we've seen the flaps

02:11are level, they're plain, right? The 787 is an interesting design. The wings are 60 meters long. It has a wingspan of 60 meters.

02:27The length of the aircraft is just 57 meters which means its wingspan is longer than the length of the aircraft itself.

02:35But this one incident of the flaps being level at a time when the aircraft literally has to generate the maximum lift, lower the flaps,

02:48undercarriage is retracted of course and as it's taking off, that points to something that went wrong inside the cockpit.

02:58The pilots must have been going through an emergency. They were trying to lower the

03:02undercarriage or something happened. We don't know for sure yet but that video is

03:07very crucial and I'm sure in the next couple of days as investigators try and

03:11gather the black box and collect evidence this is going to be very crucial to

03:16understand what happened to the tragic Air India flight 171 that crashed in Ahmedabad.

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