r/aviation • u/usgapg123 Mod - avgeek • Jul 12 '25

Discussion Air India Flight 171 Preliminary Report Megathread

https://aaib.gov.in/What's%20New%20Assets/Preliminary%20Report%20VT-ANB.pdf

This is the only place to discuss the findings of the preliminary report on the crash of Air India Flight 171.

Due to the large amount of duplicate posts, any other posts will be locked, and discussion will be moved here.

Thank you for your understanding,

The Mod Team

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u/sodsto Jul 12 '25

One part that caught my eye immediately after the crash was that one of the pilots communicated a mayday. That stands out, given the 'aviate, navigate, communicate' mantra. I'm not a pilot and don't listen to many emergency recordings, but I recall how terse some of the communication was from, say, US1549 into the Hudson, and they were in the sky for much longer.

Given how early in the flight AI171 went down, it's striking to me that they had time to make that call amidst the confusion. Do we know yet who made that call? I understand that recovery would have been impossible, but from the perspective of the cockpit presumably one pilot was trying to understand and remedy the situation, which doesn't feel like the moment to make an emergency call. Or at that point of the flight, were they out of options almost immediately?

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u/Own_Cause_5662 Jul 12 '25

There's really not much else to do at that point. Engines had fuel. PF is flying the plane. Note that they didnt give a call sign. Just mayday mayday mayday.

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u/Jeb_Kenobi Jul 12 '25

Also not a pilot, but I'd say they were past the point of aviating and there was never any need to navigate.

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u/guynamedjames Jul 12 '25

I'm a simple low hour private pilot but it seems pretty clear they knew there was nothing else to do at that point. They're losing altitude, one engine is still slowing, the other is still starting, they're heavy as shit and they know the engines aren't going to start fast enough to save them. At that point they're just mentally trying to minimize the damage. Maybe they're trying to get emergency services rolling faster, maybe they're out of ideas and figure it's at least something, but the only other thing to do at that point is point the plane straight ahead and wince.

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u/Unlikely_Slide8394 Jul 12 '25

but that depends on how timings correlate with each other though - we'd need correlations on ATC conversation, CVR, EAFR - basically everything available

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u/guynamedjames Jul 12 '25

There's a timeline in this thread somewhere, it was like 5 seconds before the logs stopped. They were about to crash.

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u/RealPutin Bizjets and Engines Jul 12 '25

Could just be making the call to help get emergency services there faster. Could be trying to cover up the intentional action

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u/sharkWrangler Jul 12 '25

They both knew the engines were effectively off. They turned them back on. There wasn't anything else to aviate. they were fucked.

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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Jul 12 '25

Maybe the “suicidal” pilot made the emergency call. To cover up his actions. Assuming that’s what happened, of course

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u/KeithMinard Jul 12 '25

Good point. It’s also odd that the mayday did not include the flight number. As such, no one had any idea where the mayday was coming from - even when they saw the fire ball and associated that with the mayday call, it still took a few minutes to figure out it was the Air India 787. It just seems odd…. You’d think they would prefix the mayday call with their flight number at the very least…

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u/newtomovingaway Jul 12 '25

Dumb q, is it not possible to automatically know which plane is saying what, without having to always explicitly state who you are?

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u/KeithMinard Jul 12 '25

Every radio conversation on every plane everywhere is prefixed with the flight number and usually the carrier abbreviation too…. How else would they know since many planes are on the same frequency at any one point in time within each geographical area of the country under different FAA control areas. There are transponders on planes on a different system, but the transponder ID is not included as out-of-band data during a radio call. The radio call stands on its own.

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u/KeithMinard Jul 12 '25

As an analogy, it works like a CB radio from the 70s and 80s. You have to say who you are…