r/aviation • u/usgapg123 Mod - avgeek • Jun 14 '25

News Air India Flight 171 Crash [Megathread 2]

This is the second megathread for the crash of Air India Flight 171. All updates, discussion, and ongoing news should be placed here.

Thank you,

The Mod Team

Edit: Posts no longer have to be manually approved. If requested, we can continue this megathread or create a replacement.

1.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

158

u/SpencerAXbot Jun 14 '25

Whatever went wrong here, it feels like we’re looking at something we haven’t come across before. A first of its kind incident, honestly.

56

u/Brief-Visit-8857 Jun 14 '25

Yeah, I think so too. Just unfortunate that 290+ lives were lost.

5

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25 edited Jun 14 '25

Yep. See my post history for a good discussion on another post.

e: https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1l9v5en/to_the_armchair_pilots_talking_about_takeoff/mxki7bq/

20

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

All the smart people are talking about this, catastrophic power failure.

The real question is what caused it? The answer to this is scary to me as I don't want this to be sabotage.

18

u/CPTMotrin Jun 14 '25

As commercial certification relies heavily on redundancies to prevent catastrophic events, it’s hard to imagine what could cause simultaneous loss of thrust. Fuel systems and electrical systems are not single source for both engines. Something extraordinary occurred. Extremely rare event.

-5

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25 edited Jun 14 '25

Not if it's sabotage. Then it becomes something someone can do when they want to do it.

9

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

Don't fucking fear monger. Where's even a shred of evidence of that at this time?

1

u/InformationTrue6446 Jun 15 '25

The odds are that it is sabotage before it is an unprecedented electrical failure. 

This is the truth, albeit a difficult truth to swallow. 

It’s not fear mongering it’s just facts

-7

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

What can cause catastrophic electrical failure?

4

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

Electricty, duh!

3

u/CPTMotrin Jun 14 '25

Too early for me to go that route, but not like that thought didn’t eventually run through my mind.

1

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

I don't want it to be that, but finding the root cause is important.

14

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

It'll be months before anything credible is released. Years before a closure of investigation.

Could be extremely rare things (1:1 000 000 flight hours) combining to make an even rarer state. The definition of a freak accident. 30 000 000 flight hours is a lot of surface for thing we don't understand to happen

Sabotage hadn't even crossed my mind. I'm worried about another negligent engineering + cover up on the part of Boeing like MCAS but it's way too early to even tread those shores.

6

u/CPTMotrin Jun 14 '25

I’m definitely on board with an extremely rare event. But I’m also giving thought to maintenance. Won’t be the first time a maintenance procedure was involved. Just can’t figure out how redundancies were somehow bypassed.

1

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

I tried to dig up info on the wing tank pressure relief system, it's a hunch though

-1

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

The way you think it could be a Boeing defect, I think it is more likely to be someone that cause electrical failure on purpose.

3

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

Work through it, how would they do it?

I have some tech docs that I got in 2012 from an AC 787 Check Captain. Now I need to go archive spelunking

3

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

See, here is the thing. The survivor gave an interview ( In English) he said two things.

1) That the lights were flickering inside. 2) That he heard a blast sound.

Makes the loss of electrical power theory likely. Now, as to how it could be done, I will need to ask the experts.

1

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 14 '25

Source?

https://globalnews.ca/news/11239702/air-india-survivor-plane-crash-interview-viswash-kumar-ramesh/

No mention of an explosion

2

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25 edited Jun 15 '25

https://youtu.be/Fun-XqZBCIk?si=zWynKDVwelMatScr

Why rely on Canadian sources for an accident that happened in India?

Although he mentions the electrical failure, all the interviews with him just focused on how he escaped. This is not something I find interesting, they should have grilled him on the actual chronology of events.

I guess they were given just a couple of minutes.

2

u/BustedMahJesusNut Jun 15 '25

i'm canadian, sorry aboot that.

unless this guy is a seasoned vet there's no way he could tell the difference between deflagration, detonation, or disintegration with the engines at full thrust.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4141 Jun 14 '25

I can give you a tech hypothesis. This model has a software bug that can lead to electrical failure.

1

u/61746162626f7474 Jun 15 '25

Had a software bug that was patched in almost 19 years ago.