🚨 Not an engine failure. Not what you were told.
The final 36 seconds inside Air India 171 have been revealed — and it changes everything.
The Black Box doesn’t lie. But what it captured may be worse than we imagined.
Screams. Confusion. And then… something no one expected.
This wasn’t a technical glitch. This was something far more human.
On June 12, 2025, Ahmedabad, India, awoke to a day that appeared beautifully ordinary. Warm sunlight gently illuminated bustling streets, vibrant markets hummed with activity, and families went about their daily routines, completely unaware of the tragic events about to unfold. Precisely at 13:38 local time, Air India Flight AI 171, a state-of-the-art Boeing 787 Dreamliner celebrated for its cutting-edge technology and stellar safety record, gracefully ascended into clear skies en route to London Gatwick Airport. Passengers settled comfortably into their seats, anticipating a peaceful journey. But tranquility was shattered in a mere 36 seconds. Without warning, the aircraft violently plummeted back toward the earth, crashing with devastating force onto the BJ Medical College campus.
The impact instantly obliterated buildings and extinguished over 270 lives. A once-ordinary day suddenly became one of immense sorrow and unimaginable loss, leaving the world grappling with one haunting question: How could such a meticulously maintained, advanced aircraft, piloted by a highly skilled crew, succumb to such a catastrophic failure? Perfect Conditions, Expert Crew The weather conditions that fateful day were ideal—clear skies stretched endlessly above, providing optimal visibility for flight. At the controls was Captain Arjun Khanna, a veteran pilot admired for his flawless 20-year flying record, respected throughout the aviation industry for his expertise and calm under pressure. Beside him was First Officer Priya Sharma, renowned for her exceptional flying skills, attention to detail, and precise execution of procedures. Together, they represented one of Air India’s most accomplished and trusted cockpit crews. The pre-flight checks were completed meticulously, with every system and safety measure double-verified according to rigorous aviation standards. Passengers, comfortably seated and unaware of the disaster looming ahead, entrusted their safety completely to the pilots’ proven expertise.
Never in the global history of aviation have so many ‘experts’—armed with so many ‘tools’—scrutinised so much about a plane going down, before the authorities did
Others were less interested in thrust and more in what the configuration of the aircraft seemed to give away. Captain Steve Scheibner, a former American Airlines pilot, zoomed in on the strange wing movement. His first hypothesis: Maybe the co-pilot, feeling some kind of pressure, had mistaken for each other the operation to lift the plane’s flaps and extend its landing gear at a critical moment—a confusion that would have removed the lift from the aircraft. “It was a simple yet fatal error,” he said.
The Ram Air Turbine (RAT), said pilot and AskThePilot’s Patrick Smith, provided another clue. The RAT emerges only when an airplane has lost all electrical and hydraulic power—a situation that arises only after both engines on the plane fail. It appeared to be rotating in videos of the crash. “If the RAT deployed, we are talking about an all-engine failure,” Smith wrote. He also spoke out on subjects as varied as tainted fuel to flaws in the Dreamliner’s digital engine control system. Scheibner presumably held this view as well, considering that he corrected his initial “pilot error” theory.
However, others, such as Marco Chan of Buckinghamshire New University, remained sceptical but not particularly sold on flap-retraction as a factor in the incident.
As these open-source theories took hold, a simultaneous wave was taking shape on social media—far less rooted in expertise, and in fact pretty close to outright conspiracy theories, simmering with fear and suspicion that can make anyone’s head spin. The comments sections of YouTube channels and Reddit boards hummed with conspiracy theories of sabotage, of even distantly remote electronic tampering.
Some circled the timing of the crash and how close it occurred in time to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-profile G7 visit. A number of the posts referred to previous threats made to Air India flights. Others, familiar with the politics of Gujarat, darkly speculated about internal sabotage.
While some so-called aviation experts mushroomed overnight, stronger voices, including the aviation YouTuber Gaurav Taneja (“Flying Beast”), weighed in too. Taneja, a retired pilot, explained the prevailing two-engine failure theory, which he supported with new simulations and an analysis of the Mayday call—“no thrust, losing power, unable to lift”—made by the pilots to ATC just before the crash.
There were even bird-strike theorists. But early scans of CCTV in the runway did not show any birds around the engine during takeoff.
Some possible maintenance problems surfaced as well. When it emerged that Air India had moved to outsource some of its Dreamliner maintenance, critics were quick to blame a lack of supervision. Elsewhere, former top Boeing manager Ed Pierson made another statement, remarking that quality control problems had long simmered at the company’s 787 lines. At an earlier point, he had called the conditions there “chaotic and dangerous”.
And through it all, one voice tried to make itself heard, to calm the storm. N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, called for patience. “There are speculations about human error, speculations about airlines, speculations about engines, maintenance, all kinds,” he said. “But what I can say for now is this aircraft, that tail, AI-171 has a clean history. As for the engines, the right engine was a newly installed engine in March 2025. The left engine had been last maintained in 2023, had been scheduled for its next routine maintenance meeting in December 2025. The histories of both the engines are clean.”
On its part, the Tata Group-owned Air India has put out mass emails, telling its side of the story. “The plane was well-maintained, with its last major check in June 2023 and the next scheduled for December 2025. Its right engine was overhauled in March 2025, and the left engine was inspected in April 2025. Both the aircraft and engines were regularly monitored, showing no issues before the flight,” stated the email from Air India CEO Campbell Wilson.
But it’s not about what actually happened. It is the speed and sophistication of the open-source analysis that has made this crash a turning point. Once upon a time, experts had to wait weeks for data to materialise. Now, with high-definition cameras and radar-tracking available to all, the global aviation community began to triangulate the truth within hours.
The leading theory, which is more a shared understanding, is that a catastrophic loss of thrust or an early retraction of wing flaps caused the plane to go down. Either of the two would have fatally left the Dreamliner vulnerable at low elevation. Whether any of this resulted from cockpit confusion, software bugs, mechanical breakdowns or lapsed maintenance will be known only from what the flight data recorder tells.
Until then, Flight AI171 is a tragedy but also a defining episode in aviation. Never have so many ‘experts’—armed with so many ‘tools’—scrutinised so much about why a plane went down, before the authorities did.
