Posts about: "Preliminary Report" [Posts: 277 Pages: 14]

So what is known at the moment?

- The flight crew consisted of an experienced Captain and a First Officer with a little more than 1000 hours. Whether or not this flight was a training event appears not yet determined.

- The aircraft departed from Ahmedabad, using full length of the runway, lifting off at an appropriate distance from the departure end and reaching an altitude of less than 1000ft before descending again to an impact. It therefore got out of ground effect. Also, the power selected for takeoff was sufficient to get the aircraft airborne within the constraints of the field.

- The landing gear was left down much longer than usual and remained so for the whole duration of the flight.

- Flaps appear to have been extended normally to a setting not triggering any pre-takeoff configuration warning. On the 787, extended TE flaps are not as obviously visible as on other types, especially with low quality pictures, but a gap between the flaps and the wing proper was visible, showing a glimpse of the engine nacelle through it.

- Whether or not the RAT was out appears not entirely clear, although there are strong indicators of it being deployed. If this is confirmed, this seems to point to a major engine or electric issue.

- Engine noise is surprisingly low on the available videos, either drowned out by environnmental noise (the 787 is not a noisy bird) or due to lack of power produced.

- Descent was at a very high AOA and appears not intentional. The crew did not decide to push the nose down.

- The aircraft appears to have been structurally intact with nothing issuing from it. No debris, smoke, fumes or liquids were in trail, no parts were observed to have been lost or dropped.

- There seems to have been a mayday call from the aircraft, possibly indicating power issues.


The crew seems to have found no reason to abort the takeoff before V1. Whatever befell them must have struck past that speed and given them cause not to retract the landing gear. Whether the lever was not moved or the systems did not react to it is not determined yet.

The aircraft had enough energy to climb to about 600, in any case less than 1000ft altitude. Ahmedabad seems not to call for a specific NADP, but whether it was NADP1, 2, A or B that was flown, it is fairly safe to assume that its normal regime would have been takeoff power and takeoff flap settings at that time.

Multiple other aircraft departed from or arrived at Ahmedabad before the accident, of which at least one must in all probability have taken onboard the fuel from the local bowsers in substantial amounts and used it without troubles, or else there would have been other flights in trouble due to this.

I am awaiting the preliminary report from the authorities and the readout of the data recorders with much interest.

Survivor and eye witness recollections can be very unreliable and need to be treated with caution. There is easy access to the flight data recorders so hopefully it won't be too long before a preliminary report is out. Boeing must be praying for the cause to be pilot error, after the way in which the company handled the crashes of the B737 MAX, the FAA won't be impressed with a video of the CEO flying onboard and telling everyone how safe the aircraft is. Anything aircraft related and you can guarantee a worldwide grounding of the type, they won't be flying while Boeing works on a software fix.

They normally publish a preliminary report a lot sooner than 3 years after the accident as far as I know.

Do we have an idea of how long it will take for a preliminary report on the cause of the accident? Presumably Boeing and GE will want to know pretty quickly if there needs to be an urgent maintenance bulletin.

A preliminary report is supposed to be published within 30 days.

But I would fully expect some findings from the FDR and CVR analyses within the next few days, given the high profile of the accident and the fact that operators of 1000-odd 787s are waiting anxiously in case there turns out to be some previously undiscovered failure mode that could affect their fleets (though that's highly unlikely IMHO);

That would require deep dive in the maintenance records of that bird, and it's ludicrous to think we'll be able to figure it out. To cause dual engine failure at "gear up" callout (everybody's nightmare, unrecoverable) - that needs to be either drastic, super weird, or malevolent. And that hole goes too deep for us to guess.

In less than a month we'll have a preliminary report.

I would guess that 787 pilot seats are electrically moved and use a worm gear drive.

I'd be surprised if they are mechanically adjusted and held in place by a pin.

If there was a loss of power, it happened after V1. Normally, at V1, all hands should be removed from the thrust levers until, type dependent, selection of climb thrust, which normally takes place not below 1000\xb4 above aerodrome level. An altitude the flight never managed to achieve. If some flight crew members seat was to slide back unintentionally, there are handles in the flight deck that one will instinctively reach for, no need to grab the thrust levers of all things.

Even if the levers may have been inadvertently pulled to idle, it would have taken one single energic adjustment to slam them to maximum thrust position (whatever it is called on the 787), for which there was some time during the brief flight. And two idling engines should not result in anything triggering the RAT release or APU auto start.

Of course, stranger things have happened, but I\xb4d consider this scenario not plausible.

There are at least two whatsapp chain messages doing the rounds (one about the seat theory and one about water on electrics causing FADEC failure). Both are very detailed but clearly fake news with incorrect dates, ECAM instead of EICAS and lots of other things which are clearly inaccurate. They\x92ve probably seen this and reporting it as news

Yes, they are electrically adjusted. So a pin is not involved and a sudden move rearward is highly unlikely.

I will wager that this is absolute nonsense. The effect of pulling the power levers back to idle at rotate would be readily countered by pushing them back up again. The engines are still delivering thrust, it is a function of N1, not the lever. The lever commands where the thrust level will end up, the N1 gives the thrust output. The acceleration/thrust characteristics of these engines is not like a J52 or JT3D etc.

The proposition that is floated is that the pilot does not pull back on the control column, which he is holding onto with both hands as his seat slides backwards like a caricature of a bad Cessna 180 seat rail, that is plainly obvious from the pitch attitude of the aircraft, yet grabs lustily a double handful of thrust levers and holds onto those until meeting Ganesh in the next life?

Greek papers appear to be as rigorous and incisive in their cognition as the Daily Telegraph. Golly.

Seats: electric.
RAT deployment... presumably the hapless pilot doesn't grab the control column, or the thrust levers, just grabs both fuel control switches instead????

Do any reporters bother to read what they write?

This page https://i1.prth.gr/images/w880/jpg/f...air-india.webp (update: also https://www.protothema.gr/images/w13.../air-india.jpg ) is an alleged summary of the preliminary report, posted by the Greek journal. One suspicious thing is it lists the URL of the report, but that's 404.

I'm posting this so that others can scrutinize the thing.

[update] The more I look at it, the less I believe it. The "Immediate ActionsTaken" and "Next Step" sections could not be in a preliminary report at this stage. Some details are wrong (like the state of the surviving passenger) or made up (the FAA emergency AD 2025-16-51 listed as source is not there: https://drs.faa.gov/browse/ADFREAD/doctypeDetails ).

That "report" is dated June 25, 2025

EDIT: It appears to be AI hallucinated nonsense.

I saw the comment stating the above on AHerald (giving a detailed timeline of events). But why would the captain keep his hand on thrust levers at Vr? Also, can electrically adjustable seats suddenly just slide backwards? Additionally, this doesn't account for the RAT deployment. If they had truly firewalled the throttles afterward, we would expect to see a pitch-up moment\x97which isn\x92t evident in the video (at least to me). Perhaps a nose-down trim could have counteracted it, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

The Ipeco seats fitted on the 787 (and other airframes) have had numerous problems and numerous Airworthiness Directives to correct issues of uncommanded movement. They are not exclusively electric (i.e. can also be manually adjusted), and presumably there is some sort of pin or locking mechanism to hold them in place and this mechanism (at least in original form or if not corrected) has been known to fail.

The most famous incidents involving the 787 resulted in uncommanded forward movement of the seat, resulting in inadvertent depressing of the yoke and an unexpected pitch down. Other Ipeco seats have been implicated in unexpected forward AND rearward movements. The FAA published an AD just a couple of days ago related to an Ipeco seat doing just that (different model seat not on Boeing planes, FWIW).


You're probably right. Until we start getting reliable information from official sources it's wise to take the theories of a single news outlet with a huge chunk of salt.

"On Jun 17th 2025 an official, a former Air India Captain trained by the Captain of the accident flight, stated, that the CVR has been successfully read out, the voices on the CVR are very clear. It is becoming gradually clear from the newly emerging evidence that there was probably zero negligence in the cockpit, the crew did not give up until the very last moment. The probability of a technical cause is high. A preliminary report by India's AAIB can be expected in a few days."

AvH

Where is this quote from? a link perhaps 👍

"The probability of a technical cause is high."

If this report is accurate, I'd hazard that a specific maintenance issue has been identified. If the "technical cause" was a system or parts failure or fault, then I'd expect a lot of similar 787s to have been grounded by now.

How could the CVR have been "read out" if the CVR hasn't yet been located?

This comment is from a low-budget news source.

well, the first violation of the process. All accredited parties agree to non-disclosure and ONLY the IIC can make public statements.