Looking at Boeing’s track record lately, I’d say unfortunately it is entirely possible, but it’s all highly speculative at this point.
What a tragedy…
In the video you can’t really tell if the flaps were down or not, but the 787 has electronic checklist and a warning will sound if you take off with wrong config.
For me it looked like a power loss, I only wonder why didn’t they retracted the gear after take off - it would reduce drag significantly.
Agree with the power loss, but the fact it seems to stay level would indicate that it was both engines
To summarize that video:
Captain Steeeve has a theory that they meant to raise the gear, but operated the flaps lever instead without realizing it.
That should be easy to dis-/prove with flight recording.
But what if they lost power early after rotation? If that happened to me and I my climb was negative, I would keep the gear down to help absorb some impact energy. Another consideration is the amount of drag initially when raising the gear due to the doors. I wondered about dumping fuel. It could have been an option but frankly when you only have seconds to live, hitting a button that will make you 5k pounds lighter every minute is pretty futile.
Raising flaps instead of the gear is very unlikely. Remember, there are at least three people in the flight deck. The extra pilot is in the jumpseat immediately behind the console. He/she has nothing to do but watch the actions of the pilots in flying seats. If the Pilot Monitoring did something so stupid as to raise the flaps, the third pilot would react immediately.
Not sure the jettison pumps work when you loose both engines, if the RAT was deployed as some people state then it usually only powers the bare essentials so you can navigate to a crash site.
I can’t imagine any singular issue that would cause both engines to loose power at the same time, even in the whole aircraft lost power they would still continue to operate because they can scavenge enough fuel on their own without the boost pumps operating. A duel FADEC failure seems highly unlikely, that’s a GE component and this isn’t the first ETOPS engine they’ve made.
Similarly, the GEnX engine on the -8 has heaps of power for the airframe it is on so even if they did accidentally raise the flaps then I cant imagine them dropping so fast.
Anyway, it’s all baseless speculation for now. I am going to be quite curious to the accident investigation.
OTOH, if you had an engine failure, the first thing you’d do would be to suck up the gear.
I’m thinking what could possibly have caused a dual engine thrust loss that they identified so fast that they made the decision to stay dirty…? They were above 600ft AGL when they started decending…
I guess one scenario that could (and has) killed two engines on an airliner after takeoff is a flock of large birds…. Probably not in this case though.
No, I can’t see any evidence of this in the video…
But it has happened before, just like mistaking the flaplever for the gear lever, or condition lever, etc.
But right now, I have no base theory. Will be interesting to hear what happened.
BTW, I just read that they are considering fleet grounding Air Indias Dreamliners…
Yeah, all the drag from those wheels being down.
Contaminated fuel?
This was interesting. The first video I saw of the crash with audio I couldn’t hear it. Also interesting to learn what triggers it and what it powers on the 787.
Adding one thing, once I saw the crash footage I was curious about the weather: 40C, 29.65 (IIRC), field elevation 189ft. I plugged that into a DA calculator and it spit out 3473ft.
It would have to be insanely contaminated for that to happen, plus the filters would just go into bypass with a message and you’d burn everything anyway. Given how it would have happened with both engines at exactly the same time if it was a duel engine failure then the fuel is extremely unlikely to be the culprit. Think more something in the controlling circuit that would cause this, though in theory even with a full electrical failure the engines should just keep running, unless something opted to run the shut-off valve’s to close or trigger a fuel valve in the HMU.
So maybe something went wrong with the CCR but I do not know what runs over that from the engines with the 78.
I read more speculation that it could only be raising the flap handle rather than the gear handle. But looking at the diagram below, they look classic Boeing and on different panels, as they have been for decades. Very hard to accept that that is what happened.
That and a lot of written speculation seems to indicate that the gear was angled, as if it was partially retracted.
Without speculating on this awful tragedy, I’ll say that FADEC bugs have been encountered in the wild before. That’s not an impossibility, however improbable.
Yet, it happens…
Not saying it did in India, but the theory isn’t far fetched.
I personally lean toward something technical.