Posts by user "Iron Duck" [Posts: 9 Total up-votes: 20 Pages: 1]

Plenty of engine noise on the video. Aircraft appears stable, wings level, not stalled. Gear down, flaps clearly up.

It obviously got off the ground before the runway end and apparently reached 635ft, at which point you'd expect gear up, flaps down, but the opposite has happened.

Although the CCTV video is of unfortunately low resolution the trailing edge discontinuity between flaps and aileron can just about be seen on the port wing at about 3/4 span, just as it can in this video at around 54 seconds in:


Looking at the original video again the equivalent discontinuity is just about perceivable on both wings, so I was wrong at first and the flaps were not retracted. What appears to be the RAT quite possibly is; at that angle the nosewheel is completely hidden by the fuselage.

It's been postulated that pulling both fuel cutoffs would drop the RAT and cause the engines to spool down. To those with SIMs, at what point in the takeoff would this action create the flightpath shown in the videos?

Then, confoundingly, there's that swirl of dust in the port wingtip vortex on rotation. Is Ahmedabad unusually dusty? Do all takeoffs there create this, or only rotations close to or beyond the end?

How would you account for the front-wheel-down angle of the MLG bogies, clearly visible in the flyover video?

Since it was spotted we're assuming that the MLG bogie position indicates that gear had been selected up, but the sequence was interrupted. It's been suggested that the bogies might droop nose-down if hydraulic pressure is lost, even if Gear Up has not been selected.

Is this the case?

A flight recorder was found 28 hours after the accident, so it's been in the AAIB's possession for nearly 2 days, but not a word has been said about its physical condition. I recall in other recent accidents that the physical condition has been publicised quickly, perhaps not least to manage the public's hunger for information.

This leads me to suspect that it is in good condition, has already been downloaded, what happened (if not why) is clear, and it is embarrassing.

There are only three kinds of root cause:

- a design weakness or fault, but this will probably take some time and analysis to establish;
- a maintenance fault by a less-than-stellar organisation in an aircraft which has been used as a Christmas Tree;
- a personnel fault.

The last two directly embarrass AI. I think we're now in the political positioning and CYA phase.

Let's postulate that engine rollback and subsequent complete electrical failure coincided with selection of gear up. The recorders will tell you that happened, and in consequence that the flight was unrecoverable, but they probably won't tell you why, especially if the event was the result of an interaction between a latent design weakness, a maintenance error or errors, and/or an unusual control input. The recorders will clear up the control inputs, most importantly whether the engines were deliberately shut down. If there was no unusual control input the cause must be a design weakness, a maintenance error, or more likely a combination of the two, the error exposing the weakness.

Indeed, but my point is that after two days, no word has been made public about the recorder's physical condition. It costs nothing and is good news management to say: "The recorder is in good physical condition but it will be a week before we are safely able to download information from it", or: "The recorder is badly damaged and will require specialist downloading, which will take some time".

Why the silence? It's fishy.

Edit: this is in reply to Callisthenes Plane crash near Ahmedabad..