Key questions in the Air India crash
It was meant to be a routine flight from India to the UK - but just 30 seconds after take-off, flight AI171 was reduced to a blazing inferno. It's been six days since the Air India plane bound for Gatwick Airport shattered into pieces after smashing into a medical staff hostel close to Ahmedabad airport, killing 242 passengers and crew - everyone except one miraculous survivor, Londoner Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, sitting in seat 11A.
Another 38 people died on the ground, but that number is expected to rise as the search for bodies continues. Meanwhile, the world is still waiting for answers, with some making lurid claims of a government cover-up. So what really happened that day in Ahmedabad? Here are the key questions demanding answers:
When will we get information from the 'black box'?
Investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) on Monday. The flight data recorder (FDR), which logs crucial flight parameters such as altitude, speed and engine performance, had been recovered from the debris on Friday. Together, the CVR and FDR form what is commonly known as the 'black box' of a plane. It is a vital tool in air crash investigations, helping experts reconstruct the flight's final moments. The Dreamliner's black box has now been taken to a laboratory in New Delhi. Typically, preliminary data from black boxes is available within one to two weeks. But in this case, rescue workers have indicated that it was severely damaged by the impact and the ferocious fire that followed the crash, meaning it could take several weeks before any data is recovered.
What caused the crash?
Investigators are focusing on a number of key areas. These include: double engine failure, problems with the plane's wing flaps, and a landing gear issue. A double engine failure, normally caused by fuel contamination or clogging, is an extremely rare occurrence and questions are being asked about the maintenance of refuelling equipment and where fuel is stored at the airport. Another possibility raised by some experts in India is that birds may have collided with the plane moments after take-off. This can be catastrophic, especially if they are sucked into the engines. Gujarat state, where Ahmedabad is located, reported 462 bird strike incidents over five years, with most occurring at Ahmedabad airport according to Indian government figures from December 2023.
Who were the pilots and could they be to blame?
The pilot, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, 56, had over 8,000 hours of flying experience. The co-pilot, Clive Kunder, 34, had about 1,000 hours. According to sources, investigators are closely analysing the trajectory of the plane following take off. It crashed around 30 seconds after leaving the runway when it climbed to an altitude of 625 feet, but videos widely circulating on social media show it as if it was landing. This has led some to speculate that its flaps, which are vital for generating maximum lift, might not have been properly extended, causing it to dramatically drop.
Is the Indian government trying to cover up reasons behind the disaster?
Indian investigators have been reluctant to comment publicly on the areas they are examining but a source revealed: 'Nothing is off the table as far as this investigation is concerned and that includes human error. That is a difficult thing to do given the nature of this accident and the huge loss of life but for the sake of the country, we have to properly establish what occurred.' The investigation is being viewed as particularly sensitive because of the impact it may have on India's wider image. Over the past two decades the nation of 1.4 billion people has gone from being viewed as a somewhat chaotic, disorganised country to one that is the world's fifth largest economy and a major political power that holds its own in the international area.
Who is leading the investigation?
The investigation is being led by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), a government run body that investigates domestic air accidents. But a number of organisations from outside of the country are also involved as under international aviation protocols they have the right to participate if they have a connection to the aeroplane or its passengers. Among those who visited the crash site this week were officials from America's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as the Boeing 787 jet and its engines were manufactured in the US. Officials from Britain's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) are also in India and inspected the crash site following the death of 52 British nationals in the accident.
Separately, a high-level committee set up by the Indian government to examine the reasons behind the crash is expected to hold its first meeting next week. It will submit a preliminary report within three months and propose new standard operating procedures to help prevent similar incidents in future.
Are Dreamliner planes safe to fly now?
Before the Ahmedabad disaster, there had been no fatalities tied to the Dreamliner model. But over the past 14 years since they have been flying there have been numerous concerns and claims by whistleblowers over their safety. Former Boeing employee John Barnett, who worked for the company for more than 30 years at its North Charleston plant in the US, where the jet is built, claimed that sub-standard parts were deliberately fitted to prevent production delays. Former Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour revealed that he raised concerns about 'manufacturing shortcuts' only to be told to 'shut up' by his bosses. Following his claims, the company is being investigated by America's FAA.
Since last week's crash, Air India has revealed that it had cancelled five international flights it operates using a 787-8 Dreamliner. On Tuesday, the flight on the same route as the plane that crashed was cancelled because of 'precautionary checks'. A flight from Gatwick to Amritsar, in north India, set to depart at 8pm UK time was also axed. And an Air India flight bound for Delhi from Hong Kong turned back after the pilot suspected a technical issue.
Does the lone survivor hold any clues?
Mr Ramesh is the only witness to what happened inside the plane. He was interviewed in hospital, revealing: 'When the flight took off, within five to ten seconds it felt like it was stuck in the air. Suddenly, the lights started flickering - green and white - then the plane rammed into some establishment that was there. 'When I saw the exit, I thought I could come out. I tried, and I did. Maybe the people who were on the other side of the plane weren't able to.'
He added: 'I don't know how I survived. I saw people dying in front of my eyes - the air hostesses, and two people I saw near me … I walked out of the rubble.' Meanwhile, his relatives insist that Mr Ramesh does not hold the key to investigations. Nayan, his brother, revealed that Vishwash 'has no idea how he survived', or how he managed to exit the plane.
Why is there such tight control around him?
The political and national sensitivities related to the air crash are perhaps best underlined by how Mr Ramesh and his family have been treated over the past few days. Within 24 hours of the accident, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Mr Ramesh in hospital. After that, the media were prevented from speaking to him and he was effectively put under armed guard.
Inside the ward where he is being treated, which is usually reserved for VIPs, around eight officers from the Indian police's Crime Branch department have been put on duty and have been restricting who comes to see him or who he speaks to. Around six other officers stand outside checking the identities of anybody entering. His relatives claim that they are facing a virtual clampdown by Indian officials concerned about the impact the accident could have on the country's image. One revealed that they have been refused permission to see him in recent days and that even his parents, who flew out from the UK over the weekend to be with him, were only allowed to stay for an hour.
Another said: 'A lot of restrictions have been placed on the family and we are not free to come and go. Some of the relatives that were at the hospital were ordered to leave. We've been warned not to speak about him or what happened and that there will be serious consequences if we do.' One said: 'He was just a passenger who got unbelievably lucky, so we don't understand why he and his family are being treated like this. Anything they have to say will not help the authorities understand why the plane crashed.'
Why have relatives of British victims claimed they are not being supported?
Following the crash, dozens of relatives of Britons who died have arrived in India to provide DNA samples so that the bodies of their loved ones can be identified. In searing temperatures, they have been gathering outside a building in the Civil Hospital, the largest in Ahmedabad, patiently waiting to go inside as volunteers hand out water to help keep them cool. The absence of any British officials is noticeable, prompting anger that little is being done to help them. The Foreign Office has set up a support centre operated by around five British officials sent out from London soon after the accident to provide 'consular and emotional assistance'. But it is located in a hidden office in a hotel close to Ahmedabad airport and few relatives of the British crash victims know about it.
When the Daily Mail visited, there were no relatives present, staff sat around chatting and there was no signage as to how to get to the centre. There have also been complaints about the length of time it has taken for relatives to receive the bodies of their loved ones and British relatives have called on the UK to help speed up the process. Hamzah Nanabawa, whose brother, sister-in-law and their four-year-old daughter were killed in the crash, told media: 'We're not asking for miracles – we're asking for presence, for compassion, for action. Right now, we feel utterly abandoned.' He added: 'There is no UK leadership in India, no medical team and no crisis professionals stationed at the hospital.'
What now for Air India and Boeing?
Air India was previously owned by the Indian government and had a terrible reputation for red tape, poor service and financial woes, losing millions of pounds annually. In 2021 it was bought by the Tata Group, one of India's most powerful business houses which is worth close to £315 billion. It has extensive interests across the world including Britain where it owns Jaguar Land Rover, Tetley, steel maker Corus and British Salt. But despite being owned by a private company, Air India is still considered the country's national carrier.
At the time of the takeover, it had losses of close to £750 million but the airline has shown signs of revival under private ownership with new aircraft ordered and services improved but according to latest figures, it is still running at a loss of over £400 million per annum. Last week's crash could have catastrophic financial implications for the airline. It has already announced compensation of close to £100,000 for the families of each passenger but could also face paying out substantially more in damages if it is found that the crash was the result of negligence.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
5 hours ago
- The Sun
Lottery results LIVE: National Lottery Set For Life draw tonight, June 19, 2025
THE National Lottery Set For Life numbers are in and it's time to find out if you've won the top prize of £10,000 every month for 30 years. Could tonight's jackpot see you start ticking off that bucket list every month or building your own start-up as a budding entrepreneur? 1 You can find out by checking your ticket against tonight's numbers below. Good luck! The winning Set For Life numbers are: 08, 10, 12, 28, 45 and the Life Ball is 09. The first National Lottery draw was held on November 19 1994 when seven winners shared a jackpot of £5,874,778. The largest amount ever to be won by a single ticket holder was £42million, won in 1996. Gareth Bull, a 49-year-old builder, won £41million in November, 2020 and ended up knocking down his bungalow to make way for a luxury manor house with a pool. £1.308 billion (Powerball) on January 13 2016 in the US, for which three winning tickets were sold, remains history's biggest lottery prize £1.267 billion (Mega Million) a winner from South Carolina took their time to come forward to claim their prize in March 2019 not long before the April deadline £633.76 million (Powerball draw) from a winner from Wisconsin £625.76 million (Powerball) Mavis L. Wanczyk of Chicopee, Massachusetts claimed the jackpot in August 2017 £575.53 million (Powerball) A lucky pair of winners scooped the jackpot in Iowa and New York in October 2018 Sue Davies, 64, bought a lottery ticket to celebrate ending five months of shielding during the pandemic — and won £500,000. Sandra Devine, 36, accidentally won £300k - she intended to buy her usual £100 National Lottery Scratchcard, but came home with a much bigger prize. The biggest jackpot ever to be up for grabs was £66million in January last year, which was won by two lucky ticket holders. Another winner, Karl managed to bag £11million aged just 23 in 1996. The odds of winning the lottery are estimated to be about one in 14million - BUT you've got to be in it to win it.
Times
5 hours ago
- Times
Léon Krier obituary: architect who designed Poundbury
Léon Krier once described himself as 'an architect, because I don't build'. As a minority voice in his profession who deplored the modernism that had dominated postwar architecture, Krier said he had made himself redundant. He assumed that he would remain a 'utopianist' for the rest of his life. Then he met Prince Charles (now the King). By the mid-Eighties the Prince of Wales was the British architecture profession's public enemy No 1 after a speech in 1984 in which he described a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a 'monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'. Charles and the London-based architectural theorist and academic Krier were destined to meet. They did so at an exhibition in 1986 to present Krier's masterplan to restore a Georgian quarter of London's Spitalfields that was under threat from modern development. Krier's elegant drawings acted like catnip on the royal visitor. 'He [Charles] said, 'Let's talk',' recalled the Luxembourg-born Krier, who wore slightly dandified Edwardian-style outfits topped off by his trademark silk scarves and had the air of a central European intellectual. 'And then he [Charles] said 'Would you like to be my consultant on architecture and particularly on urbanism?' and I said, 'Wow, my God. How could I refuse.' And then we'd meet at strange times and places. Like 3am with some Russian princess in Chelsea.' He remembered feeling touched by the 'desperate, even tragic ring' to Charles's voice when lamenting architecture. Charles had continued to blame architects for ruining postwar Britain, but in 1988 seized his chance to develop his own urban Arcadia on 400 acres of land, near the Dorset town of Dorchester, owned by his Duchy of Cornwall. The development would be planned in rigorous accordance with Krier's 'New Urbanist' principles of human scale. No building could be more than five storeys and would be configured in traditional street patterns. Houses and businesses would exist cheek by jowl. 'Timeless' materials of stone, brick and wood would be used. No one could be more than 15 minutes away from all the amenities they might need and even their place of work. Car use would be minimal. To reduce the urban sprawl he so deplored, he proposed reintroducing terraced housing that had become anathema to the modernists. It was a social experiment to disprove so much of the postwar urban redevelopment that replaced traditional street patterns and market squares with dual carriageways through town and city centres surrounded by residential tower blocks and the zoning of residential and commercial uses that created car-dependent suburban sprawl. 'Modernism is a totalitarian ideology which, like all dogmatism, is based on unprovable assumptions,' Krier said. About a year after starting on the project, Krier presented his masterplan for Poundbury, replete with Italianate piazzas linked by tree-lined streets. The plan was strong on details, from elaborate lampposts to wrought-iron fencing. Alarmed staff at the Duchy of Cornwall warned Charles that Krier's plans would be far too expensive. Krier countered that the rise in values would justify the cost in the long run. According to Clive Aslet's recent book King Charles III: 40 years of Architecture, the duchy appointed the surveyors Drivers Jonas to 'rein Krier in'. Krier had walked away from many other projects for less. 'He was gentle but uncompromising in everything he did, preferring to withdraw than be drawn into political skirmishes, inhuman bureaucracy or pollute his designs,' said his wife Irene. Matters came to a head at the prince's home, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire, when Krier, Christopher Jonas and Charles looked at the plans laid out on the large dining table. Jonas said: 'Sir, we will of course take on board what Mr Krier says.' The prince banged his fist on the table and replied: 'Christopher, you are not going to take on board what Leo says, you are going to do what he tells you.'Krier recalled: 'From then on it was open war. He called me from everywhere saying, 'You can't do this.' And I'd say, 'You have to do it. The prince wants it and he is The Boss.'' In June 1989 a marquee was erected at Poundbury Farm and the public were invited to view Krier's masterplan. It was an exercise in community architecture run by Charles's friend, the architect John Thompson. Sometimes the prince himself would arrive by helicopter and drop in on meetings unannounced. The marquee was packed and local people were mostly won round, although many thought that the buildings were too classical. An unabashed classicist by personal taste, Krier revised his plans with vernacular architecture more in keeping with the surrounding area. Planning permission for phase one was achieved in 1991. Britain was in the midst of a property crash, which many smugly predicted would scupper Poundbury — especially as Krier had ignored the advice of property experts and sited affordable housing alongside the more expensive private properties. As the buildings started to rise up in 1993, the profession went to war on Poundbury. It was sneeringly described as a 'Toy Town' pastiche of neoclassicism with its portentous porticos and public squares. A critic in this newspaper once said: 'If Hallmark were to film a Christmas movie in Britain, Poundbury would be an ideal setting.' Yet over the years the community has continued to thrive. There are now some 4,500 people living there, with 185 businesses sustaining 2,300 jobs. Poundbury has been visited by architects, planners and developers from all over the world. The estate agent Savills reported that Poundbury homes are on average worth 25 per cent more than other homes on the local market. Krier himself lived for many years in a townhouse in Belsize Park, north London, full of 19th-century Biedermeier furniture. To his critics in the profession Krier said: 'Look at where architects live. They live in old traditional houses just as I do. Why do they impose these inhuman structures on others?' For much of Krier's professional life this view was countercultural, but when the tide turned he came to be known as the 'godfather of New Urbanism'. Léon Ernest Krier was born in Luxembourg in 1946 to Jean Pierre Jacques Krier, a tailor who specialised in ecclesiastical robes and supplied most of the bishops in the country. His mother was Emma Marguerite (née Lanser). He grew up in a small, handsome town that he later described as a 'perfect embodiment of New Urbanism' and attended the Lycée Classique in the baroque monastery of L'Abbaye d'Echternach. He wanted to be a pianist, but decided to study architecture to follow in the footsteps of his elder brother Robert, whom he hero-worshipped. As a teenager he was a confirmed modernist and dreamt of 'blasting the cities I saw around me and building skyscrapers'. Then he realised that he was 'in love with the cities of Italy'. 'I tried hard to reconcile them with the theories of Le Corbusier. It was impossible.' He won a place to study architecture at the University of Stuttgart, but found his tutors impossible to talk to. The situation worsened when he researched the work of Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich, and his teachers described Krier's scholarship as 'fascist'. He left without graduating and moved to London, where he worked in the office of the modernist architect James Stirling. Four years working for 'big Jim' cured him of any remaining proclivities towards modernism. After leaving Stirling's office he developed masterplans for Kingston upon Hull, Rome, Luxembourg, West Berlin, Bremen, Stockholm, Munich and Washington, none of which were taken forward. He made his living teaching at the Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art, where he made his reputation as a lone architectural theorist crying in the wilderness. While working on Poundbury in the Nineties, he also masterplanned the Cité Judiciaire in his native Luxembourg. In recent years he worked on projects in Guatemala City and a new town near San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. In 2017 it emerged that he was working on a waterside masterplan to redevelop Fawley power station on the Solent, near Southampton, into 1,500 homes on a 300-acre site. The £2.3 billion project became known in the press as 'Venice in Britain', but, without the royal protection he had enjoyed at Poundbury, the scheme was largely cancelled last year after the developers said it was no longer viable. Krier was divorced from his first wife Rita Wolf, a painter. He is survived by his second wife Irene. Defending his New Urbanist approach to placemaking, Krier said: 'Traditional architecture and urbanism is not an ideology, religion, or transcendental system. It cannot save lost souls or give meaning to empty lives. It is a body of knowledge and know-how allowing us to build practically, aesthetically, socially and economically satisfying cities and structures. Such structures do not ensure happiness but they certainly facilitate the pursuit of happiness for a large majority of people.' Poundbury is due to be completed in 2028, 35 years after it broke ground, at which point there will be homes for 6,000 people. When he started work on the project Krier was a 43-year-old with what a profile in The Guardian described as 'a mad scientist mop of black hair'. By the time of his death the hair was snowy white but in the same unruly mop and he was proud to be the only member of the original team still involved in the project, along with the King. Léon Krier CVO, architectural theorist and urban planner, was born on April 7, 1946. He died of colon cancer on June 17, 2025, aged 79
Times
5 hours ago
- Times
Roaming peacocks divide village where they run wild in streets
'There have been six on top of my car. I've had up to 18 of them in my garden. They look nice but they're a nuisance.' Les Gladwell, 75, is talking about peacocks. Lots of them. In the North Lincolnshire village of Hibaldstow, the residents share their streets, rooftops and gardens with up to 30 wild peafowl — and opinion is split. To some, the birds are charming neighbours. To others they are noisy vandals with a fondness for shiny cars and shredding flowerbeds. Peafowl, the collective term for peacocks and peahens, are not native to the UK but with their showy feathers have long strutted across country estates and farmyards. They can live to 25 years old. In Hibaldstow they have roamed freely for decades and some locals believe the first pair came from a nearby farm in the 1970s. In recent years numbers have soared. Given the population of 2,400 people, there is an estimated one peafowl for every 80 villagers.
