Authorities investigating the deadly Air India crash that killed at least 279 are studying the black boxes of the plane, and are looking at whether it was overloaded and if the pilots were properly trained.
The Gatwick-bound Air India aircraft, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, crashed on a medical college hostel soon after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad last Thursday.
Only one passenger, British national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, survived the crash, while 241 people on board and 29 on the ground were killed in one of India’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
Experts from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau are probing the crash with assistance from the UK, the US and officials from Boeing.
Amit Singh, a former pilot and an aviation expert, said the recovery of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes, are crucial to piece together the sequence of events.
The cockpit voice recorder records pilots’ conversation, emergency alarms and any distress signal made before a crash. The plane’s digital flight data recorder stores information related to engine and control settings. Both devices are designed to survive a crash.
‘The data will reveal everything,’ Singh said, adding that the technical details could be corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder that would help investigators know of any communication between air traffic control and the pilots.
India’s aviation regulatory body has said pilots Sumeet Sabharwal and Clive Kunder made a mayday call before the crash.
Singh said the investigating authorities will scan CCTV footage of the nearby area and speak with witnesses to get to the root cause of the crash.
Additionally, Singh said, the investigators will also study the pilot training records, total load of the aircraft, thrust issues related to the plane’s engine, as well as its worthiness in terms of past performances and any previously reported issues.
Aurobindo Handa, former director general of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, said the investigators across the world follow a standard UN-prescribed Manual of Accident Investigation, also called ‘DOC 9756,’ which outlines detailed procedures to arrive at the most probable cause of a crash.
Handa said the investigation into last week’s crash would likely be a long process as the aircraft was badly charred.
He added that ascertaining the condition of the black boxes recovered from the crash site was vital as the heat generated from the crash could be possibly higher than the bearable threshold of the device.
The Indian government has set up a separate, high-level committee to examine the causes leading to the crash and formulate procedures to prevent and handle aircraft emergencies in the future.
The committee is expected to file a preliminary report within three months.
Authorities have also begun inspecting and carrying out additional maintenance and checks of Air India’s entire fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners to prevent any future incident. Air India has 33 Dreamliners in its fleet.
The plane that crashed was 12 years old. Boeing planes have been plagued by safety issues on other types of aircraft.
There are currently around 1,200 of the 787 Dreamliner aircraft worldwide and this was the first deadly crash in 16 years of operation, according to experts.
There were 53 British nationals on board Flight AI171 when it crashed into a residential area near the airport, as well as 159 Indian nationals, seven Portuguese citizens and a Canadian.
Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said Saturday he hoped decoding the first black box, the flight data recorder, would ‘give an in-depth insight’ into the circumstances of the crash.
Aviation experts believe the Boeing 787 Dreamliner may suddenly lost power ‘at the most critical phase of flight’ after takeoff.
The possible causes are believed to include a rapid change in wind or a bird strike leading to a double-engine stall.
Commercial airline pilot Steve Schreiber, who analyses plane crashes and close calls, said a new HD-quality video is a ‘gamechanger’ in diagnosing the cause and suggested the footage supported the dual engine failure theory.
He pointed out that in the footage, a small device is seen extended underneath the plane’s fuselage, known as the Ram Access Turbine (RAT), whose function is to support the aircraft’s electrical power and hydraulic pressure in an emergency.
Schreiber said that on a 787 there are three things that will deploy the RAT automatically: a massive electrical failure; a massive hydraulic failure; or a dual engine failure.
The Boeing jet took off from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel airport in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat at 1:38pm local time (08:08 BST).
The flight reached an altitude of just 625 feet, or 190 metres, according to flight tracking service Flightradar24.
There it glided, seemingly suspended midair, but seconds later began descending rapidly as the engines appeared to give out.
The underside of the jet smashed into a building housing trainee doctors working at the nearby BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital, killing dozens more civilians.
The death toll now stands at 279 as rescuers continue picking through rubble.
