Photo: AFP
The world was stunned Thursday by the CCTV footage of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashing just seconds after takeoff. Air India Flight 171 hit the ground and vaporized in a smoky fireball after reportedly losing power less than 30 seconds into the flight in Ahmedabad, India, killing all but one of the 242 people on board; miraculously, one passenger was thrown from the wreckage and survived. This was the first crash in the 15-year service history of the 787; in fact, the pilot barely had time to radio “Mayday!” before coming down in a residential area. As investigators begin the grim work of figuring out what went wrong, ABC World News aviation expert John Nance appeared on 710 WRO’s Mendte in the Morning program to offer plausible explanations.
Nance explained the sequence of events to host Jimy Failla, sitting in for Larry Mendte: “What we know is that the airplane had plenty of thrust to take off. As soon as it got into the air, however, something happened to both engines simultaneously, which is very, very unlikely in any operation of a twin-engine airplane. They did not have sufficient thrust to maintain air speed, and they slowly drifted down until they hit the building… These airplanes are built to never have something happen simultaneously to both engines, and so when something like this does occur, there’s just not a whole lot of explanation that’s easy to come by.”
Nance also addressed the lone survivor of the crash, who managed to limp away with relatively minor injuries, as nothing short of miraculous: “When you are dissipating 150-160 miles an hour in less than 150 feet, you’ve basically got metal flying everywhere, and how anybody can get out of that maelstrom of flying knives, if you will… all of those things could have been different in a microsecond… but I know we’re gonna see a lot of people saying ‘I want seat 11 A’ from now on.”
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