A plane has reportedly crashed near Ahmedabad Airport on Thursday. Smoke billows is seen emanating from Adani airport premises near Meghani.
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By JumpCrisscross 2025-06-1211:3717 reply Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.
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.
Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
Yeah, I think I might wait for the MentourPilot take on this one. I can't see any benefit in speculating.
Horrifying that it came down in a residential area with almost all its fuel still on board though. The aftermath is beyond belief.
By SecretDreams 2025-06-1212:246 reply There's footage after takeoff of it descending with the air ram deployed, no engine power, gears down, and flaps up.
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.
Gentle tip from a lifelong speculation enthusiast: if speculating now is fun for you don't let party poopers stop you.
It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.
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.
As I've learned from years of reading Hacker News, people who program computers are experts in _everything_!
By gejose 2025-06-1216:04 The source is a lot more important than the timing. Whenever Pilot Debrief or the AOPA comments on it you know it's going to be reliable.
https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AirSafetyInstitute/videos
By Simon_O_Rourke 2025-06-1216:47 Counterproductive towards what end? It's not as if anyone on here is going to be invited to present before the air accident board?
By tusim 2025-06-1212:06 I've seen so many speculations from blurry video, spotty adsb data en straight up racism about this crash.
By FuriouslyAdrift 2025-06-1214:50 There's already conspiracy theory crap on social media in India and Pakistan going around. Pretty nasty stuff already.
By traceroute66 2025-06-1213:522 reply > Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.
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.
By hoti232j4324234 2025-06-135:50 I'm fairly sure a fraction of the "techbro" community has already decided its due to Indian programmers at Boeing, or Indian managers at AI, or some other Indian voodoo in India.
Baffling tragedy, again.
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.
> gear out
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:
Regarding the intersection takeoff, Flightradar24 just tweeted this:
> 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.
By dist-epoch 2025-06-1211:401 reply A pilot speculated that it looks like a multiple bird strike.
CCTV capture of complete takeoff: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447
By 1970-01-01 2025-06-1216:081 reply I'm told not to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway because this video clearly shows there was an issue going to full thrust. It's an extremely rare dual engine failure or pilots' error not calling up full thrust to keep it flying. Very possible this is the famous bird strike issue Capt. Sullenburger experienced in 2009.
By tim333 2025-06-1222:39 It's interesting that up to about 30s in the video you can see the plane climbing normally, then it loses power and starts falling, about 10s after take off.
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.
By callamdelaney 2025-06-1221:251 reply There is a lot of dust at the 20s mark, I’d assume that there shouldn’t be dust on normal takeoffs at busy airports.
Is it normal to have human operators pointing the camera around like that? It almost look like they expected something to happen.
Extremely slow takeoff. The engines appeared to have both quit. And the plane did a slow descent and crash.
By meonkeys 2025-06-1219:52 Odd, I got a cert warning for that URL. This worked: https://xcancel.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447
