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Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

theguardian.com

71–80 of 633 posts

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#71

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.

I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure. One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle bac…

A multiple engine aircraft maintaining flight on a single engine is vastly different to the same craft being able to complete a take off when an engine fails mid process.

Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#73

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.

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.

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Boeing, but let's not start pointing fingers yet. We know literally nothing about what caused the accident yet, and the 787 Dreamliner has a stellar record: it's been flying since 2011, with over 1000 in service, and I believe this is its first ever major accident.

[flagged]

You did better. You just asked a question!

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Boeing, but let's not start pointing fingers yet. We know literally nothing about what caused the accident yet, and the 787 Dreamliner has a stellar record: it's been flying since 2011, with over 1000 in service, and I believe this is its first ever major accident.

[flagged]

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

What!? I only asked ... geesh

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#76

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.

I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure. One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle bac…

I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though. And what dual engine failures I can think of are due to failure of a shared system (e.g. fuel exhaustion, c.f. Gimli Glider).

[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]

Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#77

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.

I've seen so many speculations from blurry video, spotty adsb data en straight up racism about this crash.

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#78

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.

I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure. One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle bac…

But does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight? Based on the map it probably never got that much altitude, as it barely traveled 2*length_of_runway, and that's including the runway itself.

Re: Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

#80
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

when will the chinese enter that market? super cheap planes for everyone!

One of the few things China can’t produce as well as the west are commercial jet engines.
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