Ahmedabad pilots tried to land in empty area, say aviation experts

‘The area near the BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital, where the plane crashed, is relatively empty,’ Air Force Wing Commander Satyam Kushwaha (retired), told ThePrint.

Plumes rising above Ahmedabad airport. | PTI

New Delhi: The pilots of the ill-fated Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner were likely in control of the aircraft and may have been looking for a relatively vacant area to bring it down. This was one of the inferences drawn by Indian Air Force Wing Commander Satyam Kushwaha (retired) when he viewed the images of the crash site.

“The area near the airport is densely populated, and the area near the BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital, where the plane crashed, is relatively empty. It is probably the only open area they could see. The pilots must have predicted the crash, realised that there was no way to prevent it, and they probably tried to reduce casualties,” said Kushwaha, who runs KRANTII (Knowledge Resources Analytics Network Technology Innovation and Integration), a think tank in Delhi.

The aircraft’s nose was up even as it lost altitude, another sign that the pilots were in control, he added.

The flight, carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members, including two pilots, erupted into a ball of fire as it crashed in Meghaninagar near Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport on Thursday afternoon.

Videos of the crash show that the flight didn’t wobble before landing and went down with its nose facing upwards.

Sudden power failure, bird hit 

Speculation is rife among pilots on what happened to flight AI-171, bound for London’s Gatwick airport. Bird hit, power failure and fuel starvation—these were some of the explanations suggested by the commercial pilots whom ThePrint spoke to.

A commercial pilot from Ahmedabad said on the condition of anonymity that he feared a bird strike or ingestion of an entire flock of birds could have led to complete engine failure.

“I have had experiences with birds at the Ahmedabad airport. In one or two incidents, the birds have also crashed into my fuselage, but fortunately, nothing untoward happened,” he said, adding that birds have always been a headache while flying out of Ahmedabad airport.

He also pointed out that it seems both engines of AI-171 had failed.

“The lack of a rudder input behind the vertical stabiliser, as the aircraft stably descended to the ground, indicates a complete loss of power,” said the pilot, who has completed more than 500 flying hours.  A rudder helps a plane steer left or right, and is like a paddle on the tailwind of the aircraft.

There could have also been a calculation error, the pilot added, as the margin of error while flying in high temperatures is very thin. Taking off in 50 degrees is equivalent to taking off from a height of 4,000 ft because the air is that much thinner.

“Any miscalculation of the performance or the load, centre of gravity could lead to a mishap like this. Provided the thrust given is not enough for the calculated payload,” he said.

The plane was also really heavy, he added. This made matters worse, as margin of error reduces at high temperatures.

“Lift and thrust are correlated, so if the thrust is not sufficient to carry the payload or weight of the aircraft, it will not be able to generate a sufficient amount of lift; 242 people [on board] is almost as full as a Dreamliner gets. That means they were flying to the brim of their capacity,” he added.

Further, he blamed butcher shops in the residential area near the airport for the bird problem, as well as residents who put out feed and water for them. Ahmedabad airport spends close to Rs 20 lakh every month on firecrackers to scare the birds away.

Aviation experts also suspect that the aircraft malfunctioned due to a sudden power failure. But the possibility of a bird flock ingestion is being taken seriously. That’s what happened to US Airways Flight 1549 in 2009: the Airbus A320 struck a flock of birds, leading to engine failure. The pilot had made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, a story immortalised in Tom Hanks-starrer Sully (2016).

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)