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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.

Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.

Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.

Pro tip from an absolute rando: don’t bother with any source of breaking news. Read a weekly paper that summarises the important stuff.

If something is truly pressing, you’ll hear about it from friends or coworkers.

From the television era: Don't watch news channels; important news will be on all the channels.

I'm not convinced there is really any important news.

There's a spectacularly untimely take...

For most of the world, war between two countries in the middle east doesn't really have any direct impact, right? Liek, if I didn't know about it, nothing would change for me.

I suppose I don't know. Does your economy use much oil?

Let's say the price of petrol goes up for me. Does it matter if I know why?

I feel like it can matter a lot to be able to make a reasonably reliable prediction about whether it's likely to go up or down tomorrow and by about how much, and thus whether and when to act on the potential need to ensure some sort of access to supply.

For me, that largely entails just not doing anything. I do own a car but rarely use it since my neighborhood is very walkable, and the tank is usually close to full. Even my lawn tools are electric. But if I relied on gasoline for a commute (for instance) then being able to make good guesses about getting hold of it is advantageous, in a way that is fungible and easily shared.

At that point you may as well day trade oil futures. Its at least easier than trying to time when to fill your gas tank based on geopolitics.

You say that as though they were two semiotically distinguishable activities. Futures trading is wholesale and what we talked about is retail, but they are the same general line of business and if you think no one would ever do it to try to avoid waiting all day for an empty pump, then check out how the 70s oil shock and supply crisis - the last time anyone ever dared "sanction" the U. S. and A. - played out here domestically.

If it is supply you are actually concerned about you buy a couple jerry cans that you keep full. Watching geopolitics to try to time anything still makes no sense.

Then you're only getting things important to viewership. Nobody's putting an economically critical trade deal on all the channels, or a genocide in Yemen. But Princess Diana dying, that's gonna get coverage.

Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago.

> Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago

If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.

Suggestions for some sources to read? I know the Economist, anything else others would recommend?

I really like the Economist as a source of weekly news.

Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.

The Economist?

I just unsubscribed from the digital edition. A neoliberal and globalization bias in overall tone.

They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.

Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.

Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"

Haha, that's so funny.

Agree, The Economist knows who they are and they're very happy to throw some acidic British humor into their writing for fun.

I have gave up on E. once they supported GWB over Gore. I can barely understand over the top devotion to neoliberalism and deregulation. But the shortcomings of GWB were sticking out in the campaign, so closing the eyes and singing "la la liberalism" was way too much for me.

Le Monde Diplomatique

https://mondediplo.com/

Available in many languages

Any background on funding sources/ongoing sources of revenue/ownership?

> The publication is 51% owned by Le Monde diplomatique SA, a subsidiary company of Le Monde, from which it remains editorially independent.

Le Monde is owned by a French billionaire: https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/democracy-in-france-de...

Economist for me. I don't know of any other sources that can reach the same level.

I had been a Economist subscriber for almost 20 years. But then gradually I realized that their reporting on some issues are extremely biased and they conveniently skip reporting some facts to match their intended narrative and lead the reader to distorted conclusions. So I would assume they would be doing the same with other topics as well. I did not renew my subscription.

Did you pick up something else?

Could you give some examples?

The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan as it was beginning... they took an entirely "Might Makes Right" position, facts be damned.

Well you're missing out and stunting your own worldview if you stick to only one source of information (regardless of which it is).

What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.

Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.

Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.

I think WSJ is a good complement to the Economist. They have good, unsensationalized coverage of the facts. I ignore their opinion columns as they don't seem very serious.

This was mostly true 20 years ago. This has not been the case for many years at this point. WSJ is now the print version of Fox News.

That hasn't been my experience at all outside the opinion section, which is precisely what you described.

The main section feels pretty anti Trump, actually. Not by choice but reality has an anti Trump bias ;)

They are also quite good at labeling their opinion sections clearly, which I think a lot of other papers aren't doing. Their news section is basically Reuter's.

WSJ is nearly tabloid quality. If you have self respect, read the FT; if you just want weekend reading, read the FT Weekend (it comes with the FT Weekend too, which is excellent long form journalism but not “news” per se).

That's just another Murdoch rag, I wouldn't wipe my arse with it. Better no news than his news. You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.

As they said, you can skip the opinion columns.

You think the opinion pages are the only place he pushes his agenda? The very stories they report are selected to further the narrative he wants. That's why apologies and retractions are always tiny.

With all due respect, have you read it regularly?

In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.

My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.

> Lying by omission

I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.

> apologies and retractions

Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.

EDIT:

> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.

Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)

https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read

of what, bias?

Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones.

I also read the Economist. Other than that, Wall Street Journal is quite good at purely factual, unopinionated coverage. Note that their Opinion section is heavily biased towards the American right, but I mostly ignore it. It's clearly labeled as Opinion.

Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.

I really enjoy the Monocle "Globalist" podcast which is well-produced, of global range, and a welcome departure from the npr/kqed bubble I was immersed in.

It comes out daily.

Tangle

https://www.readtangle.com/

https://legiblenews.com

reuters

Pro tip from another rando: If you hear about it from friends or coworkers, don't assume it's pressing.

It might just be sensational and of course they repeat it, just like they'd send on a chain letter/email etc. back in the day.

Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement.

> Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement

I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.

Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.

"The Week" is a great magazine for this purpose.

pro tip from an internet addict - r/aviation has a great community of pilots and aviation techs with insightful comments.

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...

The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.

Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.

This is why I like the Economist. They don't assume the reader has background knowledge.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

+1

“news” detox is as important as a healthy or non existent interaction with social media.

Unfortunately for everyone's brains, this turned out to basically not be true with COVID- only real news fans (or people with expertise in the relevant science, but there are way less of those) were remotely aware that offices probably weren't going to be closed for only two weeks[0]. If you followed the news closely you stocked up on toilet paper when there were runs on it in Hong Kong, before there were runs on it where you were, etc. But if you only got news from the office water-cooler you'd have been none the wiser.

This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.

[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common

If nobody followed the news or social media, there wouldn’t have been runs on toilet paper to begin with, as there never was a shortage to begin with and it was all just mass hysteria.

Unfortunately, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. One must plan for both the actual threat and the response to the perceived threat.

It was never clear to me, but at least part of it was supposedly due to everyone pooping at home using consumer TP instead of at the office, using commercially packaged TP (two-ply, giant rolls for big dispensers). And that sudden shift started to empty shelves. If people had stocked up over a period of time, the empty-shelves situation that produced the fear probably wouldn't have happened.

Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.

Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.

I never really understood the importance of it anyway. People were locked in their home so they could just use the shower head if it came to it. Of course a real bidet would be better and cleaner but I don't think they exist in northern America or Northern Europe.

It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.

Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.

That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.

What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.

I'll never understand why bidets are so niche in the USA especially after there are TP shortages every couple of years.

Not to mention how gross cleaning yourself with dry tissue is.

Oh yes I was just writing the same. Water is much cleaner yeah. About half the houses here have a bidet.

I think many people in countries like the US or northern Europe wouldn't even know what it's for when they see one :)

I would put it at 1% here. They are extremely rare. Bidet attachments have become relatively popular here over the past decade though. It's been life changing (or maybe butt changing). It's amazing how pretentious Americans can be while having such a gross habit.

Yeah, the deep irony of the GP comment is that, had all of these supposedly knowledgable people just read the original report from the WHO (~early 2020), they'd have realized many things about the virus (such as the extremely skewed age distribution of the seriously ill) that would have greatly mitigated the overall panic. It literally took years for the chattering class in medicine to understand basic information that was available at the beginning of the pandemic.

COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.

A million Americans did die of it, the lost QALYs was... a lot. A lot of people died who had more than a decade, actuarially. That's a big deal.

But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.

But would that have been actionable information for the average person? What would you have done differently on the first day, given perfect information?

The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.

In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)

Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.

That was pure panic. I live in the gulf coast. Anytime there is a minor chance we are getting hit by a hurricane people panic buy and suddenly there isn't any water on the shelves anymore. You'll see average folks with 20 cases of water being shoved in their massive SUVs for a family of 3.

Sure. However, I bought a large pack of toilet paper when I saw headlines about hoarding in HK, before the shelves began to dwindle here, and thus dodged the whole thing. That it was basically panic is neither here nor there: paying too close attention to far-off news did actually pay off in a tiny way.

Sam Rogers: You are panicking.

John Tuld: If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking.

—Margin Call (2011)

TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.

Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.

[flagged]

By "exception that proves the rule" I meant that paying too much attention to the news is basically maladaptive, until it occasionally isn't.

Please don’t do this here.

Imagine thinking IQ and understanding a cartoon correlates to intelligence or knowledge...

it's a copypasta

It's also possible to just not read news altogether.

Best decision I’ve ever made. It’s honestly so exhausting reading news regularly.

Like so many addictive habits, while you’re in it day to day, it feels so… important… and when you’re out… it doesn’t even make sense that complete truth could be fully knowable in the moment.

Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.

Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.

For those who haven’t encountered Admiral Cloudberg, this is a good opportunity: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

Amen.

I don't recommend this; instead, I recommend reading factual reporting, not 'analysis' which often comes with inherent political bent/bias.

Even that isn't enough. Much of the bias nowadays comes in which specific facts and events you report, and which you ignore.

To the contrary, I find analysis very helpful when it's of the "is this important; is this unusual; how does it fit in with previous expectations" variety. Raw headlines and factual day-to-day reporting are often kind of bad at that.

Why? I went news cold turkey about 6 years ago and I'm very happy with that decision.

Why? Because I personally believe those who are not regularly informed are exacerbating the problem in why the electorate makes the decisions it does.

You could spend the time you'd have spent reading the news instead reading actual books on history, poli sci and political philosophy, ethics, economics, et c., and then figure out who the right person to vote for is and what the right votes on various issues are in like 30 minutes of search-n-skim per election.

This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.

I have a BA in history and a MPA in public administration. I have already done a ton of that work: research, academic analysis/writing, and understanding. I agree these things are INCREDIBLY important to have a great foundational understanding of how the world works/worked; however, understanding current events is JUST AS IMPORTANT.

But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.

Even if news reading informs an electorate, there's no need to be informed constantly when I only have limited opportunities to vote.

When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)

It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.

If you don't read the newspapers, you are uniformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.

My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.

The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.

She definitely has a point here. The problem is that a democracy kind of needs the media and a public discussion.

How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?

That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.

It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.

Which thinkers do you read?

> How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?

I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.

Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.

We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.

I totally get that, and agree to a degree. For me personally though, the news industry has become entertainment - TV news is hyperbolic, 24 hour breaking news for every story, newspapers (at least here in the UK) are little more than a propaganda outlet for the views of the billionaire owner where every story is designed to make people angry and point the blame at someone, usually immigrants. For years I listened to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme every single morning, until I realised that none of what they were telling me was actually news. You'd be amazed at how many stories started with the words "Ministers are today expected to announce..." - this isn't news, it hasn't happened yet. This is government PR. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0] - it's incredibly eye opening. Reading it now, 11 years later, is even more eye opening - everything he writes about in there is now magnified ten fold.

Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_%28book%29

That "BREAKING NEWS" fuss is kinda a US specific thing though.

In Holland we just watch the news at 6 or 8pm (at least for those who still do that) which is very factual. Or we read nu.nl or nos.nl which don't really have screaming clickbaity headlines unless some shit really hit a fan. Which is really rare. I prefer nos.nl because nu.nl has too much celebrity news for me.

But we don't have any of that weird "Watch this NOW or get left behind!!" FOMO bait I see when I tune up CNN.

It probably helps that NOS is publicly funded so they have no incentive to maximise "engagement". Their job is just to report the news in a clean way.

I'm in the UK and while nowhere near as mad as US news channels, it's definitely been heading in that direction for a while. Even the BBC, our publicly funded station is like it now thanks to several years of the far right campaigning to get the BBC's funding taken away. Tune in to BBC news now and you're highly likely to see stories on "issues" that 90% of the population has no interest or opinion on, but some swivel-eyed, right wing fringe nutjobs have managed to push into mainstream news.

Not to be rude, but why should we care what you believe?

If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.

Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.

Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.

Same. I have never really followed the news. Everyone always seems to be upset by something in the news. Meanwhile I'm happy as a clam all the time and just have all my time to focus on myself and doing what I want and like.

Because not everyone is privileged enough to be able to ignore news.

I wonder what you mean by that. What is so bad that happens if you don't watch the news for a day or a few days? A colleague might mention something you didn't know yet? I'm sure they'd be happy to fill you in.

Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.

I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.

Your attempt at an irritated jab is just the doomscroll addiction talking.

Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.

shame doesnt work anymore

[flagged]

Read pro and anti analysis if possible. Then decide for yourself which makes sense.

[dead]

Good way to cure a news addiction: Read news from years ago, see how much of it was actually accurate and meaningful in retrospect.

Yes, I remember scrolling through an archive of Newsweek covers over the years, and realizing how much of it was just pure hype or inconsequential.

years ago i wanted to make a site where you could log promises/predictions made in news media and then get a reminder to come back and check if it actually happened. This would be useful for all the doom and gloom headlines and predictions, especially economic ones.

Totally agreed.

I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.

News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.

If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.

The concept of unbiased news is a very recent invention. Before that all news was partisan.

I understand but in the past you probably did not have much of a choice. You read the newspaper your parents read or you listened to the same radio programs and watch the same TV channels so the bias was not necessarily apparent.

Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.

Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.

Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?

The answer is that you don't.

If you don't read news, you are uninformed. If you read news, you are misinformed

I”m reformed. I reread hn.

LOL. Guilty also.

Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...

Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.

The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.

I only read the comments.

Just read The Economist. Only comes out weekly!

Similarly The Guardian has a weekly publication - https://support.theguardian.com/uk/subscribe/weekly

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a digital option?

I can access a digital Guardian Weekly through my public library's online magazines (Hoopla or Libby or some such).

Thanks, that's good to know.

And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/

Yeah that's weird. The Guardian has a global catchment area. It's no longer a Manchester or UK paper. A lot of foreign readers wouldn't subscribe to a print sub because it's not worth the hassle.

I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.

Reading one source of news only, especially one with such marked bias, is bound to leave you with a limited worldview. Consult instead a variety of sources.

Yep, I subscribe to the Le Monde weekly, 10 printed pages newspaper delivered home. Enough to know what's what and done.

Considering the amount of cash and/or subsidies that Le Monde has received in the last 30 years from the French government, you may as well read the Pravda. Nobody bites the hand that feeds them.

I don't think it received anything? Besides a VAT of 3%? But it is the voice of it's 3 owners.

You can read all about it here https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aides_%C3%A0_la_presse_en_Fran... if you want and if you understand French.

Basically the French new outlets are some of the most subsidized on the planet.

Just to give you some quick figures, in 2010, the French government gave news outlets 1.8B euros in subsidies and in 2012 another 1.2B euros. There is no mention of the subsidies in the years after that but there is no reason to think that these would have shrunk significantly.

That's not even mentioning the special tax breaks that journalists get and the fact that most news outlets are staffed by union members.

Knowing that most unions are leaning left politically, it is fair to say that the coverage of the news by these outlets will be tainted by their political ideology. It's just human nature.

All of this to say that in light of all this, it is best to treat any French news outlet as basically an arm of the government that will never go against the interests of the their real owners, the politicians, unions and the billionaires.

Le Monde is but one of these outlets but nevertheless they take the money just like the other ones.

I want news about France, from abroad. I take what I can get. I also have the Washington Post, The Economist, Nikkei, BBC, NYT, etc. and I'm sure you have plenty to say about them.

At the end, the goal is to have as many different sources and make your own opinions from their analysis.

Not necessarily. In Holland our NOS is publicly funded which is just defined by law. A minister can't just change that.

If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.

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I used to do that too, but the Rittenhouse incident was the final straw for me. I remember reading in the magazine that he "shot into the crowd", but by that point I had already watched the video analysis on the New York Times's YouTube channel which showed that he only shot at people who attacked him. That was what the jury agreed with as well.

In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.

So one inaccurate report about one event and you swore off "The Media" forever? Doesn't seem very wise.

"Final straw". One straw alone won't break a camel, will it?

I don't know if that's meant to be a joke or serious, but I would disagree.

Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.

And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.

I especially liked the story last week highlighting that wet streets cause rain.

Is there an online version of “last week’s newspaper”? More specifically, that primarily contains reporting about somewhat “matured” topics, as opposed to still developing news.

It’s not online, but Delayed Gratification is a quarterly news magazine that reports on the news of the _previous_ quarter with an up-to-date perspective. It’s British but covers world news.

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

I agree with that wholeheartedly. The problem is that people want to discuss today's news now. Explaining them this and not being able to engage in the conversation isn't a great way to connect with people unfortunately.

I suppose one way (now that you've brought this up, which is totally valid), is to openly state that this is what we know right now, and that often changes in a week.

And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)

There's always the weather... how's yours? Mine is warm, a bit of cloudy, and a bit of smoke in the air from PNW fires.

Mine has been crazy - sunny, then rained, now overcast and all while being unseasonably humid. I should have mowed the lawn while it was sunny earlier but missed the window to get it done.

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.

blancolirio on YT gives more timely but objective (i.e., tries to stick to the latest facts) takes on aviation incidents. There will be a fair bit of speculation still...

He made a quick video on this one, but just listing questions we don't have answers to yet, and warning that there will be plenty of speculation. I expect he will have several follow ups as more facts come up.

100% agreed on MentourPilot. He was the only one to not try to make money on jejuair speculation for example.

Also as an engineer you can actually learn a lot about technical and social failures.

Yes. Unfortunately this year alone will give him quite a backlog. Every month there's been a couple of disasters or near disasters and there's no apparent connection between any of them.

Yep, looks like the return of regular airline crashes. The 2010s will probably be the apogee of airline safety for some time to come.

Why though? What’s changing? With all the relevant data this would probably be a good problem for an LLM to “ponder”.

> Why though? What’s changing?

I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.

Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.

Hiring shortages, policies that favor less skilled applicants, aging infrastructure, high demand for air travel.

I haven't by any means been keeping count but it does feel like there have been a lot more incidents that usual this year, and certainly a lot more fatalities.

What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.

I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.

No, it's not worse. If you look through the list of deadly plane accidents, the last year has been average (4 vs. 3 avg).

Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.

It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.

People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).

Maybe globally it's an average year but the DCA crash alone makes it an extraordinary year in US commercial aviation.

Not all crashes are created equal. A 10 person Cessna disappearing near Nome, Alaska !== mid-air collision above the Potomac.

If you're looking at US news sources, I don't think you need to resort to clickbait and fearmongering to justify the increased focus.

There is a media difference though since the DCA crash. Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January. My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.

On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.

Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.

Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.

Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.

> My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.

In 2012, in a rush to break the news, WGN 9 in Chicago mistook the set of Chicago Fire tv show for a real crash.

https://q1057.com/news-anchor-mistakes-movie-set-for-plane-c...

https://metro.co.uk/2012/12/01/plane-crash-telly-as-chicago-...

> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.

We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.

> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]

Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.

Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.

The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.

Probably chickens coming home to roost on the 2000s-era "flying is ultra-safe now, time to deregulate, disinvest, and capture value from efficiencies"

DCA was good old-fashioned complacency and normalization of deviance. Aside from that, this year has been unremarkable in aviation safety.

Deregulation has been a thing for 40-50 years

There were enough that he made a video discussing it. Maybe because they've been particularly high profile incidents.

Here's a list of plane crashes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incide...

Compulsive debuggers, probably not uncommon here

9/11 showed us the damages of a plane crash with a full load of fuel can do and goes to show why dumping fuel is part of the procedures when planes are coming inf for a landing under "strained" conditions.

Fuel dumping is overwhelmingly to prevent or minimize an overweight landing and subsequent brake/tire overheating and inspections. It’s got not much to do with minimizing fuel-fed fire after impact.

I know it's not his fault, hate the player not the game, but he will make what off this crash (and his analysis ofc)? $10k?

I remember long ago he said he would not report on crashes but that's what people want so no blame..

I hope he makes $20k. Or more. I enjoy his content and the insight he brings. Also many people make money from the tragedy of others. Morticians, coffin builders, clean up crews, construction workers, concrete companies…I could probably come up with 100 more examples. Just because their work is from the result of something tragic doesn’t mean it is any less important.

Being completely frank he does a very good thing. He's got through to our eldest about how important it is to do things correctly, and be systematic and detail oriented, in a way that her mum and I have really struggled to.

The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.

So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.

Let him. But your or anyones enjoyment isn't a greater good. NTSBs work is important. He's an entertainer of curiosity.

Most of his videos are on crashes. He has said he won't speculate on active investigations, but has already done videos on what is known, and preliminary reports.

No, pretty sure long long ago before he was big, he said he won't do crashes period. But doesn't matter, and he can change his mind as he pleases.

You're either misremembering or misunderstood something, or I'm not understanding what you mean, because Mentour Pilot literally has a channel with nothing but air crash investigation videos: https://youtube.com/@mentourpilot

He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.

They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.

Some people have a spine and still get hate by braindead zombies.

You're upset that he's benefiting by providing an expert perspective on a topic you're interested in?

Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.

I find MentourPilot’s consultant persona grating and avoid his content, but in terms of sensationalism there are far worse.

He is actually really good. By far the best on YouTube. The quality is so high (because it's based on technical reports), you can learn something from it as a professional engineer.

I really don't know what you are talking about.

MentourPilot is not exactly the only YouTuber going off of actual technical reports, and I did not question his accuracy — I said I find him "grating". I'd rather watch old Mayday episodes than MentourPilot — Greg Feith, for one, is a great communicator. John Cox, too.

I find his content over-produced. As in, he puts too much effort into the production instead of just dispensing the information. I like Kelsey from 74-Gear and Juan Browne for their down to earth delivery. But that's what makes YouTube great having so many choices.

What do you think the big media outlets make on crashes? And they suck putting all kinds of unwarranted speculation and bullshit on the airwaves.

Media isn't free, especially well produced media that's taken it's time to research.

There's footage after takeoff of it descending with the air ram deployed, no engine power, gears down, and flaps up.

TBD on the cause, but loss of engines for some reason seems to be the case.

I do agree that a lot of info comes out first week that isn't all right. I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos.

> I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos

Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.

Agreed, but it doesn't look like AI. Video(s) look real to my untrained eyes. Everyone is going to speculate regardless of the top level disclaimer. I rather just at least present what data is available as of now.

The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.

> present what data is available

It’s not. It’s one video of unknown quality and relevance, picked somewhat randomly out of all the other available videos and data, the most relevant of which aren’t publicly available.

> Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself

It’s the usual emotional coping through baseless speculation. There are healthier ways to deal with uncertainty amidst tragedy.

Some people trust their own thinking to judge what they see.

We know it called mayday and then lost communication. It also stopped transmitting GPS data.

Looking at this it likely lost all electric power. The electric power comes from generators driven by the turbines.

If you lose both turbines you lose electricity. You also lose the hydraulic system so you can not get in the gear or change flaps.

Occam's razor checks out.

Don’t these Dreamliners also have back batteries?

They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).

This analysis is convincing about being able to hear the sound of the RAT from the crash video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbDJjgN7Xbo

Even on light GA aircraft the radio will run for an hour on the starter battery. This narrative doesn't sound realistic.

Yes and many pilots being walkie talkies in GA as backup. Not sure if airline pilots do this though. And its kinda hard to root around for it and fiddle with it while trying to keep an unpowered jetliner in the air. They're more for emergencies where the radio is the only problem.

By the way, the age old rule is "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" in that order of priority. So it could be they just had their hands full with the Aviate part.

Yes, lithium ones, those were the ones that kept catching fire then the 787 was just out.

I guess they're just for the time until the RAT kicks in. Or to augment it.

Ps there's also the APU, a small turbine in the tail for generating electricity.

I wish every news was held to this standard.

The industry would be substantially smaller. This runs counter to the interested of every existing industry participant.

I agree. Not sure if there's any possible alternative worlds where the checks and balances shake out something better either sadly.

Do you have a link to that footage? I've seen speculation on this from very blurry video but nothing like proof.

On the professional pilot forums the consensus guess is inadvertent flap retraction, instead of gear retraction, leading to inability to climb.

A 787 can still climb with flaps up and two healthy engines. In the video that was posted everywhere, you can CLEARLY hear the RAT spin, which gets deployed automatically when both engines go out.

> A 787 can still climb with flaps up and two healthy engines

Not at takeoff weight with the gear down, this sentence is incorrect.

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Or birds hitting both engines. But that must have been a big flock then

It's unlikely that a bird strike with dual engine failure would occur without smoke.

Well, loss of engine power and gliding to a stop is not that a far fetched case. Why is there not a fuel dump button to prevent a whole trips worth of fuel going up in flames?

There is, but dumping takes time, and it’s not done over populated areas. It would be low on the pilots’ checklist in an emergency.

Yes and smaller airliners don't have it. As I understand it, it's for the widebodies because they often have a higher maximum takeoff weight than maximum landing weight. Meaning that if they just took off and need to return right away they have a big problem. Because they're too heavy to land.

They were only 600ft in the air, barely anything would have got out before they hit the ground and you'd have just set non-zero amount of innocent people on fire in all likelihood when the crash ignited the trail they'd left.

There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.

Most airplanes can dump fuel, but it's not an immediate thing, so not really applicable here (and obviously doing it over a city is to be avoided as well).

It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.

No. Most airliners CANNOT dump fuel. This capability is limited to long range wide bodies, like this 787. Neither the 737 nor the A320, which constitute the majority of commercial air traffic, can dump fuel. Fuel dumping is normally performed at an altitude where it should be able to evaporate before hitting the ground, and it takes a long time, maybe 15 minutes to get from full fuel to maximum landing weight. Using it would have made no difference to the outcome of the flight other than making a larger fire on the ground.

Didn't Sully dump fuel before landing in the Hudson, thereby increasing the buoyancy of the plane?

No, the Airbus A320 cannot dump fuel.

A more dispersed fire. The amount of fuel isn't changed by dumping.

No. I said a larger fire, and I meant it. The fuel on the aircraft is not the only thing feeding the post-crash fire. Dousing the entire flight path with an accelerant would have resulted in many many buildings being on fire, instead of just a few of them.

It's possible to dump fuel but you don't have time to dump enough in an emergency

because painting an entire neighborhood in flammable fluid isn't safe... if it doesn't catch fire it'll corrode everything it touches.

most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.

> most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight.

When fuel is dumped, it's at high altitude where it just evaporates.

Short haul jets can't do it, but their max takeoff weight is around their max landing weight, so it's fine. For long haul, it's not the same.

Are both opposing replies just wild speculation from two educated software engineers that don't actually know anything on the topic?

> most planes can't dump fuel anymore

This is true but irrelevant to this crash. Most commercial jets are smaller (A320, 737 etc) and can't dump fuel.

Long-haul jets like the 787 do have the capability.

https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/comme...

No one overestimates themselves in other knowledge domains quite like software engineers... with the possible exception of medical doctors.

If it’s HN, yes always.

This airplane was not at high altitude. It crashed right after taking off. It only ever climbed to a few hundred feet in the air.

Yes, I was refuting the generic "planes don't dump fuel" statement.

It wouldn't have been in this case, is the point people are making.

It won't corrode I don't think. It's just oil, it's not petrol like in small airplanes.

Both slats and flaps were on maximum during the entire flight.

That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.

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Do you have a source for this footage or are you referring to the video everyone is recirculating?

Gentle tip from a lifelong speculation enthusiast: if speculating now is fun for you don't let party poopers stop you.

Call me a "party pooper" if you will but maybe you shouldn't be having "fun" with an accident that will have killed hundreds of people.

On a long enough timeline we all die. Guess we shouldn't ever have "fun".

No, that doesn't at all follow from what I said.

I think boing messed up the service.

They did this because they are parasites that value a few $$ over human life.

Everyone knows it after the MAX.

Everyone involved in MAX (including engineerings) should get a live in prison without pardon.

Sincerely, A fellow engineer

It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.

For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.

In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.

That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.

And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.

Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.

This is true. I don't entirely trust Boeing, especially since this is looking like a failure of the aircraft systems. If a thousand randos speculate one may guess the right answer.

russia is a tryharderist state

As I've learned from years of reading Hacker News, people who program computers are experts in _everything_!

If we program computers, it doesn't mean we don't have other jobs unrelated to programming. (At least for some of us.)

The source is a lot more important than the timing. Whenever Pilot Debrief or the AOPA comments on it you know it's going to be reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AirSafetyInstitute/videos

A week isn't long enough. Just wait for the official report.

I mentally earmark a month and wait for something "official" or at least some expert analysis which can be confirmed. I'm not sure what the experts could discern from any video that's out there, but sometimes it's a lot.

I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.

So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.

Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.

Counterproductive towards what end? It's not as if anyone on here is going to be invited to present before the air accident board?

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

I hate so much how whenever something bad happens there's a huge rush to come up with theories that place the blame on some group or ideology you already hated for unrelated reasons. I've stopped paying attention to the news in part because I don't like how disingenuously giddy people get whenever there's a mass-casualty event. I don't even mind morbid curiosity about death and suffering but nobody should ever see it as a benefit to their chosen group-identity.

It speaks for itself that this gets down voted.

The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.

Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it

Yeah.

But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.

This is why I despise Trump-bashing. Not that I think he's a particularly great person or leader, but when everything going wrong in the world gets tied back to him, I know it's ideologically driven.

There's already conspiracy theory crap on social media in India and Pakistan going around. Pretty nasty stuff already.

This tip goes for pretty much any non-aviation breaking news as well.

> Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.

One week ?

Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait.

The investigators have access to more than you or any other armchair investigator or journalist will ever do.

> Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait

For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.

You mean like the official report that gave us the magic bullet theory?

I'm fairly sure a fraction of the "techbro" community has already decided its due to Indian programmers at Boeing, or Indian managers at AI, or some other Indian voodoo in India.

[flagged]

Does most visited equate to most advanced?

What does language have to do with it?

If you write news in English, you should probably know how to use English. This shouldn't even need to be said, retard.

Retard, in english, is a slur for a very stupid person, fyi.

I think gp was sarcastic?

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 back around.

Why would a flock of birds large enough to be ingested by both engines of a two-engined plane not also be large enough to be ingested by all four engines of a four-engined plane?

Good point. We should be discussing eight-engine planes.

Like the b 52 bomber. I always liked them. We could convert them for passenger flights. Airlines could develop luggage pods that hang from the wings and the planes support mid air refuelling so that could help with turnarounds. They also have tail guns for even more safety. Also huge bay doors which will make getting on and off the plane much faster.

Make the cabin a cartridge that clicks into the bottom. Give the cabin wheels and propulsion.

Thunderbird 2 was always the best one. Even if those stubby forward-swept wings don't really seem like what you need for the normal mission profiles!

Door to door international service. I like it.

This is where some of the E-Plane concepts really shine. Let's see a flock of birds take out every engine on this NASA demonstrator:

https://sacd.larc.nasa.gov/asab/asab-projects-2/x57maxwell/

We should be discussing no-engine planes, since they are obviously safer in such situations.

Yes, why would we put those polluting and noisy engines on the plane?

The passengers could just take turns going out and pushing.

Bicycle pedals at every seat. Maybe with a deadman interlock so that if you stop pedalling your seat falls out of the plane.

What's with these comments

¿Por qué no los ocho?

>Why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?

They do if you drive over a stinger (or perhaps a sufficiently large number of nails or other sharp objects).

They also do if you go around the car with a knife and you stab them.

But it is somehow implied that the context of the comment is normal driving conditions.

Perhaps that comment could be reworded like:

>When driving on a highway, while not being pursued by the police, on planet Earth, with a road temperature below 200C, and not driving behind a van transporting nails with an open door that's dropping them on the road, why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?

That way people could get a better sense of what it is about.

The kid would have to have a pretty large glass milk bottle hidden under his coat for that to happen.

In the 1980s a British Airways 747 flew through volcanic ash and lost all four engines. So just having more engines may not always be the solution, as in suitably unlikely circumstances you can still lose all of them.

(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009

It depends on the situation. Redundancy and additional power increase margins. More for the sake of more isn't necessary helping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ewa7R20MA

Lufthansa 747-8 after engine failure:

   *We're not an emergency.*

Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.

PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.

> Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.

I think it's more that they needed the prestige of having the biggest planes, offering a whole bedroom with shower etc. It goes well with their ultra luxury image.

If it's just about seats that can fly smaller ones with the benefit that they can operate more frequently and thus attract more transit passengers looking for a good connection. That's their main market.

An A380 is quite a hassle because most airports can't even handle one.

That airports are usually not an effective destination for the B747/A380.

Connect major hubs like FRA with JFK and it makes sense. You need capacity, it is a long route and slots are rare and expensive. And for Emirates the hub concept is crucial.

But yes. The luxury thing is also part of their show. But it fills the plane ;)

There's many more hub airlines though that don't use them. Is Emirates really that different? Or are they kinda stuck because they went all-in.

Many operators dropped the 380 during COVID. Makes sense but they never took them back on afterwards and passenger numbers are higher than ever before now. The A380 is cool but it was built for the past not the future.

Wow they were lucky to be able to relight them with the engines full of glass.

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.

If during your takeoff roll you lose one engine on a twin engine jet below speed V1[0], you reject the take-off. V1 is calculated for the aircraft such that above that speed you are able to safely take off and execute a go-around in order to land again on just that single engine.

Aborting above V1 is heavily discouraged because usually there's a strong risk of running off the end of the runway. Of course, if you lose both engines above V1, you're really in trouble and left without much choice.

But we don't know what happened with this flight so nothing I've said here should be taken as indicative of whatever went wrong in this case. It's purely information.

[0] Which depends on many factors including the type of aircraft, loading, weather conditions, state of the runway surface - for example, wet, or iced - etc., and needs to be calculated afresh for every take off.

Yeah in some cases rejecting after V1 is a better choice. If you're going to impact something anyway you'll be doing it with a slower speed and no vertical component in that case.

An airliner in the US did it and the pilot was praised for making that hard decision. Everyone walked I think. I forget which flight.

Modern commercial aircraft is designed to operate on a single engine through all modes of flight.

One a plane reaches v1 during takeoff, it can lose an engine and still takeoff.

It an engine was lost before v1, the takeoff would be aborted.

Here is an Airbus doing just that.

https://youtu.be/5QMJ3_NiWbs?si=5nZ4yU7T7hsGSUu2

I've spent a few million line kilometres in a variety of airframes and understand that "designed to operate" through an event is not the same as "actually survives" that event.

There are many factors at play and things are complicated by unexpected failures.

Thank you for the video that demonstrates a pilot aware in advance of planned "engine failure" can cope with such an event in scheduled test conditions.

How does sitting in a plane more than average give you more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators?

Pilots, aircraft engineers, and safety regulators also sit in aircraft.

The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.

EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.

There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.

At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.

EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.

If you claim to be an aircraft engineer, professional pilot, or safety regulator - say so.

Everyone in the formula 1 subreddit uses jargon, none of them are F1 drivers.

I can reinstate the reply if you like, but michaelt made the same point moments after I did, and I preferred his "jargon" rather than my "fancy vocabulary".

I'd prefer if you addressed the content of my two comments above your https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257232 and explain which part caused you to imply I believe myself to have "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators".

We know that twin-engined airliners can successfully take off on one engine. It happens from time to time. E.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna179267

At no point did I claim that multiple engine aircraft cannot complete a take off on a single engine.

The statement I made:

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

is about having _no_ thrust power during take off.

The other statement I made acknowledged that test pilots in planned and scheduled clear weather conditions often test aircraft with mock engine failures, then pointed out that this is very different to an unexpected failure during non test flights.

Yes, sometimes these things work out alright (as per your example), other times not so much.

You did challenge the claim that they could complete take off on a single engine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44256705

Not at all.

Landing sans power is landing with no thrust (no functioning engine).

Completing a take off with no thrust isn't possible unless the craft is a glider, a hot balloon, or a ballistic launch .. taking off with a single engine is not "taking off sans power".

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.

The full length was used https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/live/air-india-boeing-787...

> does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight?

Any time after it’s too late to abort takeoff.

Pilots should be able to “regain full control of the aeroplane without attaining a dangerous flight condition in the event of a sudden and complete failure of the critical engine…at each take-off flap setting at the lowest speed recommended for initial steady climb with all engines operating after takeoff…” [1].

[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/136694/en 25.143(b)(1)

Your comment does not deserve to be downvoted, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It's baseless speculation by someone who doesn't have any relevant expertise, based purely on conjecture not any facts around the accident.

It's _exactly_ the kind of comment that deserves to be downvoted here.

The guy's just asking if four engines instead of two would have made a difference?

It's curiosity, it's learning, it's looking for an explanation.

That's exactly the kind of comment that deserves to be here.

>[...] who doesn't have any relevant expertise,

Is that a requirement to comment on this thread?

Do you fulfill that requirement you brought in?

Maybe I'm overly strictly pattern-matching on the type of people that tend to use the phrase "one has to wonder"; but I don't think that's usually uttered from place of learning and exploration.

If I'm wrong, then apologies to the OP.

Do you have relevant expertise in this topic?

On the topic of dudes online speculating wildly?

Yes, I've been on this website quite a long time, unfortunately.

Maybe OP also has lots experience speculating about airplane safety so let him talk.

>On the topic of dudes online speculating wildly?

Is that the topic of this thread?

Yes.

[flagged]

The last nine comments in this thread have had nothing to do with a plane crash; and entirely about a meta-discussion about a comment someone else made.

> The guy's just asking if four engines instead of two would have made a difference?

We won't know until we have all the details and the exact cause of the shutdown.

That is entirely where I'm coming from - plane designs from the past had longer wingspans and supported 4 engines. Engines have gotten more efficient and powerful so cross-ocean routes don't need 4 engines anymore.

So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2. The vast majority of airplane accidents happen at takeoff or landings, if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore.

Also I would venture that 99% of comments on public forums like this are from people without expertise. My expertise in this space is a curiosity about planes for a few decades, taking some actual flying lessons, and being generally interested in aviation to go to airshows, watch youtube content from pilots, etc. I probably have about the same aviation knowledge as an average HN person.

> was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2

Impossible to answer until we know the cause. If it was independent powerplant failures, then yes. If it was e.g. fuel contamination, pilots improperly shutting down the engine, some other crap failing, then no.

Speaking as someone with aerospace engineering and GA pilot experience.

Current speculation around the raising of flaps suggests that independent engine failures weren't the cause. Proper investigation with access to better data than grainy video will tell us if that is the case and why.

"4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn though (we'll probably get to the point in future where four large engines are superior in efficiency to two of today's engines, but two large engines to that latest design will still be more efficient than four smaller ones...)

> "4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn

With turbines, yes, for fundamental reasons. With electric motors, on the other hand, perhaps not, though not particularly relevant to a long-haul route like AMD-LON.

True. Also the electric/turboprop propulsion compromises like Heart Aerospace's that trade off the limitations of the respective powerplants by fitting pairs of both. But that's a different use case...

(I get to write about arrayed space thrusters in the day job too, but again, fundamentally different physics and goals...)

>if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines [...]

It's pretty clear what the guy is inquiring about.

Speaking as someone without aerospace engineering or GA pilot experience. My only relevant experience here is being able to read.

> My only relevant experience here is being able to read

Double bird strikes are “independent powerplant failures.”

It's not only that engines have gotten more efficient and powerful, its that they have also increased the reliability. The other issue is that 4 engines share almost all of the failure modes that 2 engines do. If you have 2 engines that fail that are on opposite sides of the aircraft, having 2 others isn't going to help as its likely a system failure in the aircraft or a fault in that particular model of the engine that could affect all of them. For example, if you run of fuel or have a failure in the fuel delivery system, it's not going to matter if you have 2, 4 or more engines. The mistake is thinking the probability of a 4 engine failure is significantly less than 2 engine failure for all types of failures.

>4 smaller but equally as efficient engines

Larger jet engines are more fuel efficient than smaller ones, because larger diameters allow for more bypass air and therefore more fuel efficiency [1]. It is a function of size and a lot of the engineering goes into materials and designs to be able to increase size and maintain strength. So you simply can't make 4 engines that are as efficient as 2 large ones, and that is compounded by the significant additional weight (and drag) of the duplicated engine parts and mounting structures.

>if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore

Everything comes with tradeoffs. Adding more engines mean more complexity, more maintenance, more chance of single engine failures, etc. You don't want to introduce more failure modes than what you are trying to fix. The move to two engines for large aircraft and the evolution of ETOPS (Extended Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) involved a lot of people considering a lot of scenarios. I can guarantee the "why not 4 engines" question has been studied extensively.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/why-do-jet-engines-keep-getting-lar...

>taking some actual flying lessons

Unironically, you're probably way more qualified than most of the people here throwing rubbish at you.

A classic on places like this.

I am happy to acknowledge I had a completely wrong knee-jerk reaction to your phrasing, and incorrectly assumed your "One has to wonder..." was meant as a suggestion of a solution, instead of instance of thinking out loud!

Apologies!

> So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2.

Smaller turbofan engines are less efficient than larger ones. This is because they have a lower bypass ratio - thrust generated by turning the big fan over the thrust generated by combustion.

So expect even bigger engines.

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).

> I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though.

The most well known double-bird-strike incident is probably the one where Sully landed a plane on the Hudson River.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Takeoff...

-edit: ok, everyone had the same thought, haha -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

There certainly have been bird strikes that disabled all engines.

> I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though

There was this very famous double bird strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

The Jeju Air crash from late 2024 (still under investigation) also had birds go in both engines.

Everyone's sassing you about forgetting.

But in the video of the plane taking off and crashing, there's no clear, obvious, or tell-tale "poof" of bird turning into exhaust as there often is in bird strikes.

That doesn't rule it out.

Hudson/Sully was dual engine bird strike no?

>Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything

Selection bias

The lower the barrier to entry of the subject matter the lower quality the people discussing it. This crap is like the Kardashians for white nerds with stem degrees.

The people with the requisite dozen brain cells to common sense realize these problems are complex and keep their mouths shut.

> I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though.

What? It happens multiple times a year. They made a movie about a famous incident (US Airways Flight 1549). There's even events with four engine strike (Eastern Air Lines Flight 375).

While the counterexample is a real gaff on my part, it's 100% Absolutely Not True that there are "multiple" airliner total thrust failures every year.

That wasn't your claim, though. You spoke of double-bird-strikes, of which there are multiple per year.

So far this year, it's happened at least twice resulting in engine failure.

Jan - Air New Zealand NZ207 - aborted take off following dual bird strikes and both engines damaged.

~~Mar - Ryanair FR 4102 - dual bird strikes on landing resulting in injuries and hull loss.~~

Before that, in December 2024, Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed on landing following dual bird strikes, resulting in the loss of all PAX.

These aren't as rare as you believe they are.

Ryanair FR 4102 apparently happened in 2008, not March. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair_Flight_4102

Baffling tragedy, again.

Clear skies, no LiveATC but reports of single Mayday call, gear out but no flaps and no control inputs visible in the grainy video. Something has to go really catastrophically wrong with a modern jetliner for that to happen, like the very dense flock of birds in Korea with the 737 a couple of months back.

The very short intersection takeoff seems like a good hint (and terrible practice), but all gears and engines look kinda OK from the outside. If they‘d scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, there’d probably be some visible damage, or at least some gears sheared off.

EDIT:

Fully agree with the speculation in light of tragedy comments, but aviation is a bit of a special case. The reason it’s so safe is because an awful lot of people immediately start looking into potential reasons and then spend years getting to the bottom of it. The initial speculation is like an exercise: what could have happened? What if I’m in that situation, and need to act now, without knowing much of anything? If you do that a couple of dozen or hundred times throughout your life, it really builds a foundation for when an actual emergency ever happens to you.

It’s a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you won’t talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: they‘re mentally walking through a potential emergency and what they‘d then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, there‘s muscle memory, 10000x over.

EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.

> gear out

That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.

> but no flaps and no control inputs visible

Standard Dreamliner operating procedure, you take off at flaps 10 or 5, they are barely visible from the outside, see many random videos of 787s takeoffs on Youtube like this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ld_zyEESazI

> That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.

Oh fascinating! I would not have considered that but it totally makes sense.

True on both counts, was a quite early comment and initially thought they're coming back in to land vs barely having taken off. Only leaves control inputs but given how short the video is it could also be that there simply wasn't much to input/correct anymore despite the slight rocking.

Can't edit anymore, but the general gist of catastrophic failure needed to prevent a 787 from climbing out of this situation still holds.

I don't think you'd expect any control inputs in that scenario. They were level with a reasonable pitch angle. Aircraft attitude was fine, they just didn't have enough power to arrest the descent. Such a loss of power with a full load of fuel definitely indicates a swift catastrophic failure to the engines at least.

Very much so. Gear retraction should only happen if (generalizing here) you've established a "positive rate of climb".

Regarding the intersection takeoff, Flightradar24 just tweeted this:

> We are continuing to process data from receiver sources individually. Additional processing confirms #AI171 departed using the full length of Runway 23 at Ahmedabad. RWY 23 is 11,499 feet long. The aircraft backtracked to the end of the runway before beginning its take off roll.

https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1933138841214611760

FR24 is also on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lrfwaqs2ls2...

A pilot speculated that it looks like a multiple bird strike.

Why no control inputs then? Surely, the plane could still be commanded in absence of engine power.

The engines power the hydraulic actuators in an aircraft an aircraft of that size cannot be trivially controlled without that hydraulic system. The APU should have been started to provide backup power in the case of engine failure but during take-off there is already very little time to do anything and it's possible that the sudden workload overloaded both the pilot and copilot or some other human factors were involved.

That being said, in the video I saw, the aircraft was already going too slow to realistically recover. And all you would get at that point is just an extended duration of glide which at best would let you find a less populated area to crash into.

You can hear what sounds a lot like the very distinct sound of the RAT having been deployed in one of the videos. There is also no main turbine sound. This really seems like dual engine failure, for whatever reason.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ahmedabad/comments/1l9i1ga/om_shant...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_air_turbine

I saw you mentioning this but the RAT on the 787 sticks out of the bottom and should have been visible at around :04 seconds into that video when the aircraft silhouette is visible clearly against the background.

Although it's possible I am just missing from the video. You are right that the sound is quite distinct and can be clearly heard in the video.

The RAT is surprising tiny on the 787, and this is a phone video of a monitor, then run through Reddit compression. I am of course not 100% sure about any of this.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ95qKj...

edit: here you might possibly see it on the right, a very tiny blurry thing

https://imgur.com/a/CElWKzQ

source: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...

Yeah I saw that picture and came back here. I think you are 100% right that the RAT is deployed.

From the video of the runway it also seems like the aircraft didn't do a short takeoff (ADS-B location data is always crappy on the ground in my experience so this is entirely unsurprising).

There was a "smoke cloud" from behind the left engine which could also have just been a dust cloud right after rotation.

The flaps allegedly could be at only 5° (which is why they're so hard to spot) because of the runway inclination.

The mystery thickens...

There is a video circulating that the air con was off on the previous flight - that might indicate why the APU was off for the crash flight as well.

Air conditioning is powered by bleed air from the engines (or the APU or a ground source). The APU wouldn't be running during any normal flight, it's normally only ever used on the ground when the engines are off and there's no external power source.

So I am not sure what you are trying to say here, sorry.

The 787 doesn’t use bleed air to power anything.

> There is a video circulating that the air con was off on the previous flight

... on the ground - sorry I forgot to add that.

What would you do with the controls? There wasn't an alternative landing area they could have got to.

About all they could probably do was to try to get the engines going.

I don't really know enough about this, but what would you expect the pilots to do with that control if they don't have any thrust? Unless there was a suitable landing spot very, very close I don't see what they could do even if they have full control of the plane. There is nothing they can do except getting the engines to work to avoid a crash, the only thing controls would give them is the option to choose a slightly different place to crash.

But also how long after take off do you retract the flaps? Can it be a pilot error (took off without flaps?). It happened more than once in the past, though I thought a modern plane like the dreamliner would make that mistake nearly impossible.

What do you mean by "(and terrible practice)"?

An intersection takeoff is a takeoff where you do not use the full length of the runway. When you are a large aeroplane with a full load, reaching the necessary takeoff speeds required to rotate (pull up and begin lifting from the ground) can take longer than normal, at which point the climb speed will also be reduced if not properly compensated for (e.g. you miscalculate something and set the wrong elevator trim/takeoff thrust/something else).

When you are taking off, you have a short portion of the runway which you can use to abort the takeoff depending on failures, but that portion can become even shorter depending on the length of the runway.

Usually the first part of takeoff you would abort for almost any reason, and the second part you would only abort in a serious emergency, once you reach a certain point you simply cannot afford to abort because you will not stop in time to crash into whatever is at the end of the runway at which point you must take-off even if you are going to immediately request an emergency landing afterwards.

So if you are heavily loaded, with a lot of people on board, and you do an intersection takeoff, you are taking a risk that if you made a mistake or something goes wrong you will not have the ability to safely recover. That's why it's a terrible practice in this case. All it does is save a little bit of time which would be spent taxiing to the actual start of the runway.

Why is it a thing? Everything else in aviation seems to have good amounts of checks, balances and buffers. It feels the same to me as skimping a couple percent on fuel or doing less frequent maintenance. Both also reduce turnaround time.

Depends on the circumstances. Probably not the case with a jet like a 787, but sometimes ATC will allow small planes to 'cut the line' with an intersection takeoff.

This runway was over 2 miles long. If you are in a smaller commuter prop plane or small jet, you don't need half that space for the takeoff. You call up ATC and they give you the option of taking off at an intersection now, or being #15 in line behind the heavies, its totally fine to do that if you are within the operating margins of the aircraft. The pilots have already done the math to know exactly how long of a runway they need for the worst case scenario (rejected takeoff just below V1), so if they know that they need 5k feet worst case scenario, and are offered an intersection takeoff with 7k feet of an 11k foot runway, there is already pretty big margin built in.

The thing to remember is that the aviation community and manufacturers have decided that once a jet is past a certain speed, you are committed to taking off and climbing out no matter what is going on. There is no circumstance where airliners will go beyond that speed and then try to reject the takeoff, and land back on that same runway.

As far as fuel, you might be distressed to know that you rarely fly with full tanks. They typically fly with the amount of fuel their route uses for the load they have + a margin for diversion. This is both a cost savings measure, as well as an operational concern (for example at Denver during a hot summer day, a lot of planes can't be loaded to maximum weight and still be able to do a rejected takeoff)

Good question. False sense of routine, experience? Definitely a pet peeve.

Was flying as a passenger on a really small airline (8 seater plane, Green Air) out of San Jose in Costa Rica. We got cleared for takeoff ahead of a United 737, at most 500 feet into the humongous runway for that plane. Yet the pilots still put in the 2 minute effort to taxi back to the beginning of the runway, even though they could have easily taken off from where we entered it. Don’t know if it was their protocol or the pilots decision, but I will trust this airline for a very long time.

Pilot here: even in my small Cessna I will backtrack do you know why? Because it gives me that money more options to work with in case something goes wrong with my take off.

The most useless things in the world are runway behind you, altitude above you, and fuel in the fuel truck.

If something large had just taken off ahead of you, it was probably not safe to go anyway. Wake turbulence can kill you. If you need to wait 2 minutes, why not back taxi? It'll feel like doing something vs nothing and you get the extra extra runway.

We took off ahead of them.

Usually some form of mis-management which in this case may have put pressure on the pilot to accept a shorter take-off option due to some minutes of time saved. Sometimes pilots also might get their priorities wrong. There's a concept of "get-there-itis" which is also a common cause of crashes but it's currently unclear if it was a factor in this case.

I imagine in a while we will all be able to read the investigation reports, since the aircraft crashed shortly after take-off the black box recorder should contain all the information we need to figure out most of what happened including possibly the reasoning for the decision to make an intersection takeoff.

A recent, famous case of "get-there-itis" would be the 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash (that killed Kobe Bryant and several friends/family members).

Less time on runway means more throughput for a given buffer time between planes or larger buffer for a given throughput.

Now, obviously there's a discussion to be had about where the line is and what should and shouldn't be standard operating procedure but there's basically no safety improvement to have even a fully loaded 757 or Learjet or whatever drag it's butt to the very end of a 15000ft runway.

A pilot may be trying to scoot out of there ASAP because he knows based on the radio and who's where that's gonna make everyone else's jobs a little easier. An airport is run by professionals all of whom are trying to make things run smooth. It's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from a school or Starbucks parking lot.

„Runway behind you“ is drilled into your head as one of the useless things in aviation. You always want to make sure to use the most runway available to you, exactly for cases when something happens. Hypothetical in this case: you realize something’s wrong with the plane, but you’re already too fast and close to the end of the runway to reject the takeoff because you wouldn’t be able to stop in time anymore.

Large airports with heavy traffic sometimes have operational constraints to send a plane out ahead of another from some intersection, but if the ADSB data is correct, taking off from half the available runway in a fully loaded 787 isn’t a good idea. You just give up a ton of margin for errors.

it means using less then the full length of runaway available. I'm not a pilot but i'm guessing that it's not good because it adds an unnecessary potential complication to the take off.

CCTV capture of complete takeoff: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

I'm told not to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway because this video clearly shows there was an issue going to full thrust. It's an extremely rare dual engine failure or pilots' error not calling up full thrust to keep it flying. Very possible this is the famous bird strike issue Capt. Sullenburger experienced in 2009.

But doesn't seem like a bird strike issue here, right? And given the rarity of a dual engine failure, seems to point to not calling up full thrust? But seems to me that this kind of error would be more common without any technical safeguards?

It's interesting that up to about 30s in the video you can see the plane climbing normally, then it loses power and starts falling, about 10s after take off.

Apparently the pilot radioed "Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift!” 11 secs after takeoff.

It would seem to fit with a bird strike on both engines. Or contaminated fuel I guess. The stuff about flaps seems irrelevant.

Quite likely this and Jeju Air crash in Korea and Sully landing in the Hudson were all caused by bird strike taking out both engines.

There is a lot of dust at the 20s mark, I’d assume that there shouldn’t be dust on normal takeoffs at busy airports.

It’s possible they had to use part of the runway that most other takeoffs don’t need to extend to. Just pure speculation.

Is it normal to have human operators pointing the camera around like that? It almost look like they expected something to happen.

It's not uncommon, people like planes.

Extremely slow takeoff. The engines appeared to have both quit. And the plane did a slow descent and crash.

Those slow seconds of falling must be psychological torture. If I'm in a plane crash I want it to be instantaneous.

It looks like it was fast enough that most people on board probably didn't realize they were about to crash, or they crashed within seconds of the realization. As torturous as that must have been, it was thankfully very very brief.

Odd, I got a cert warning for that URL. This worked: https://xcancel.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

Flightradar24 reports that this occurred immediately after takeoff:

Initial ADS-B data from flight #AI171 shows that the aircraft reached a maximum barometric altitude of 625 feet (airport altitude is about 200 feet) and then it started to descend with an vertical speed of -475 feet per minute.

https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1933091913567285366?t=MhY...

This also means that the flight was fully fueled and it's sadly unlikely there will be any survivors. There are also casualties on the ground.

There was one Survivor at least!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

So 425 above ground level in a plane that has a 200 ft wingspan, they barely got out of ground effect.

Apparently, there's a survivor.

https://x.com/sidhant/status/1933160167816007842

“Thirty seconds after take off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” said Ramesh, speaking to the Hindustan Times. He said he “impact injuries”, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

Seat 11A. That's interesting, typically most survivors are located in the back, this one was in the front-center.

The plane seemed to come down tail down so I guess that end would have absorbed the shock more. 11A is front left by the way.

I meant the section of the plane was between front and center, behind business class.

Someone on the r/aviation thread speculated 11A would be right above the gear assembly and is hardened.

I cannot comment on this specific point, but /r/aviation in general is terrible after an accident.

11A was next to the emergency exit. There was a comment on Reddit suggesting he actually bailed just before impact.

That doesn't make sense. 100+mph into terrain is going to go way worse for you out of a seat than in it.

Not if you ride the door!

You ~cannot~ don't want to "bail just before impact"

A plane at takeoff is pressurized, and that pressure holds the doors closed, as well as the physical locks. You cannot open it.

Don't believe random reddit comments. Average people know less than nothing about planes.

Speaking of random people knowing less than nothing: I believed that at takeoff and landing, planes were slightly overpressurized to increase airframe rigidity. I think I got that impression from a very old pilot, so either it used to be true or it was never true and I'm just wrong.

This person probably did not bail out of the plane in order to survive, but maybe you COULD open the doors at takeoff and landing, not that you want to.

Additional edit: I've actually flown a few times while running the barometer on my phone for funzies. I might be able to find a log of data to confirm or deny my mistaken belief! It's fun to do because you can see the pressurization increase signalling that the pilots are preparing for descent even before they tell you!

The pressure inside is not more than atmospheric pressure at the ground. In fact I think they only maintain the pressure of around 1000m or so. There would be absolutely no point pressurising the cabin higher than atmospheric pressure at sea level and if they did you'd feel it before the plane took off.

https://imgur.com/a/ni11fhQ

They redact some part of the text on the ticket, but leave the scancode unredacted, which contains all of this text and more :P

The lottery guy. And he is unscratched!

I call bullshit.

There is a person on X who says he has left the plane before takeoff and has uploaded videos of non-functional entertainment panels: https://x.com/akku92/status/1933114664923148455

I guess it’s kind of surprising in a relatively new plane, but I encounter non functional entertainment systems relatively often. They’re not treated like the safety critical systems by any airline

I thought the same but he implies that the screens were not the only tech not working (AC, seats damaged).

It is quite an intuition to decide to leave a plane in such a moment. He just escaped death and is now aggressively attacked for saying something potentially relevant.

He did not leave the plane, he said he was on the previous flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad, before the plane then went on to do the Ahmedabad - London flight when it crashed. You can see his flight ticket in the tweet.

Ok, thank you, didn't realize. He wrote two hours and I expected this to be another long-haul flight.

It reads to me as if he was on the flight before the doomed flight.

India is a large country, so a plane travelling a route like Delhi→Ahmedabad→London isn't unusual, with passengers able to board and disembark in Ahmedabad.

(There may also be security rules like requiring continuing passengers to disembark with their hand luggage before reboarding. I don't know, it's 15+ years since I took a flight like this.)

No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc.

They could both point to poor maintenance by the airline

In other words, they are the "No green jellybeans" clause, proving the vendor didn't thoroughly check all the details.

I'm a system engineer - the hardware kind, not the more familiar network kind - and that is my job.

While obviously the color and type of candy does not matter and I understood the reference, I can't find anything on google when I look for "no green jellybeans" so I wanted to link what you are referring to which is the "No brown M&M" clause that Van Halen had in their contracts:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Air India has a long history of poor maintenance. Not many crashes, but lots of reports of poor cabin maintenance, broken electronics, air conditioning not working, etc.

Is the inflight map for the passengers on the minimum equipment list?

Sure. But it could imply a lack of maintenance.

"No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc."

No. No no no. This is wrong, mistaken thinking.

A minimum standard of operations and attention to detail must be adhered to for high consequence / life critical endeavors and that behavior (culture?) must be enforced at all levels throughout the operation.

Ignore this heuristic at your peril - as either a consumer of these services or a provider who must demand high performance from your workforce.

Remember: flight attendants have (rarely exercised) critical health and life safety responsibilities. What messages do they internalize if this is the fourth flight in a row the coffee maker has been cracked and out of order ?

It’s wildly unrealistic to expect maintenance to fix 100.0% of issues, and to fix them immediately at that. There’s a balance to be struck with on-time performance that will naturally prioritize safety critical maintenance while postponing cosmetic repairs until they can be performed without schedule pressure.

Eventually it all folds into one management org, that is the whole issue.

I wouldn't expect two parallel cultures in a org, one for safety, one for entertainment systems.

My point is more that non-functional infotainment on one single flight is just simply nowhere near enough data to judge a whole organization.

hmm. theres a theory that the faulty entertainment/AC power bus could have played a role in a cascading power failure if a rare known edge case called a FADEC reboot were to occur.

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1lb7knp/air_india...

I don’t think this is necessarily the case here.

Airlines are large and heavily regulated organizations, and passenger amenities (once successfully certified) might just not be in the loop for mandatory maintenance cycles and certifications.

Maintenance of IFE units vs. avionics or the airframe itself might as well be performed by completely different contractors, maintenance crews etc.

Sure, nice brown M&Ms type relation. But I've encountered entertainment systems failures on Virgin, Emirates, Qatar and they're all among the safest airlines according to this https://airlinelist.com/

The M&Ms were for cases where the show was likely to be considerably more demanding than what the venue normally handled, and they needed to make sure that the people running the place actually stepped up for it.

The organizations doing aircraft maintenance are always handling life-critical stuff. You don’t need a weird test to see if they’re paying attention.

It’s not like this stuff is just decided ad hoc and planes fly with broken IFE equipment because of bad culture. This stuff is worked out by engineers and regulators. There’s a list of stuff that needs to be working for the plane to be allowed to take off. If something on that list isn’t working, you don’t fly, even though the plane may be perfectly capable of it. And I guarantee the IFE equipment isn’t on that list.

Frequently broken passenger amenities indicate bad customer service but it doesn’t reflect on safety.

Swissair 111?

Correlation just helps lead you to common causes.

Not a cause but and indicator.

I mean technically there is a correlation, it’s just very unlikely to imply causation.

Normal for Air India and not relevant to the accident. Tata has been trying to resolve the previous owners poor management of the airline.

Who leaves a plane due to entertainment being down?

You there to watch a old movie in 720p or to go somewhere?

Wow the 787s look so dated compared inside compared to even a320 neos!

A Boeing Whistleblower engineer had warned of premature failure of this Boeing 787 Dreamliner and had asked US congress to bring down every single plane of this model type 1 year ago.

He died of “suicide” suspiciously right after. I hope Boeing gets investigated for failure after failure after failure, and crashes it has caused recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...

His warnings were about the fuselage construction. This doesn’t appear to be a structural failure, of the type he was worried about.

He raised concerns on many issues including the fuselage issue

>Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, says he faced retaliation, including threats and exclusion from meetings, after raising concerns over issues including a gap between parts of the fuselage of the 787.

That particular issue you quote, was only given as a single example

The whistleblower in your linked article, Sam Salehpour, is still alive.

Oh ! , you're right I'll edit the comment (wont let me edit anymore, i hope others read this comment).

I mixed him with the other Boeing Whistleblower John Barnett Thanks !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)

And to be fair, there is AFAIK absolutely no reason to believe Jon Barnett's didn't take his own life. Indeed there is overwhelming evidence that he pulled the trigger, alone.

Now whether he was driven to suicide by Boeing's unrelenting and unending persecution campaign against him as a whistleblower is another, perfectly valid question.

Flight Crew

Sumeet Sabharwal – Captain - 8800+ flying hours Clive Kunder – First Officer 1 - 1100+ flying hours

Cabin Crew

Aparna Mahadik – Cabin Executive-1 Shradha Dhavan – Cabin Executive-2 Deepak Pathak Irfan Shaikh Lamnunthem Singson Maithili Patil Manisha Thapa

This was crew of AI171. Next time you're on a flight please take a moment to thank the pilots, CISF staff and cabin crew for all they do to keep us safe.

Some news outlets are indicating that there are some survivors: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/air-india-dreamliner-cras...

> Several injured passengers have been evacuated from the scene and transported to local hospitals.

Edit: The BBC is reporting local police as saying: "There appears to be no survivors" https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c8d1r3m8z92t?post=asset%3A8731...

It crashed through the dorms of a medical college. The injured must be from there. Unlikely anyone on the plane survived.

Edit: Looks like 1 guy from the plane made it.

It hit a medical facility of some sort - student doctors etc, so maybe also be on ground injured

Most likely bystanders who got injured.

You ain’t walking away from a fully fueled aircraft crashing unfortunately…

Crazier things have happened. It would not be shocking if a couple of people survived.

Indeed. There were survivors from that horrific Korean flight that crashed into the concrete wall.

This guy did: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3v6drp96zo

holy shit. relatively unscathed at that. I retract my statement obviously.

he must've been thrown out at just the right angle to not hit too much along the way...

B.S. how do you walk away from that? This is some frankly humiliating reporting by BBC

Oddly they concatenate his names just as it appears in the passenger manifest (which airlines often do). But that’s not his name.

What do you mean that's not his name?

His name is Vishwash Kumar Ramesh. But, like an odd game of telephone or something, many news sites are displaying his name as Vishwashkumar Ramesh. And it seems the error is due to the passenger manifest. Airlines often combine first and middle names. It’s odd for news sites to not notice the error. Especially when also naming the brother who has a similarly-constructed name (Nayan Kumar Ramesh and also the deceased brother/passenger Ajay Kumar Ramesh). It’s probably due to western unfamiliarity of the Indian name. (They wouldn’t make the error with a Davidwilliam).

They concatenated the first name & middle name i think.

Isn't it possible to eject the fuel / fuel tank if crash is imminent?

Sure, if you don't want your wings anymore. The wings are the primary fuel tanks. You can drain the fuel out during flight but the process can take hours.

Ah, the old “Wings Stay On/Wings Fall Off” button.

There is a fuel drain button, it's just slow. Google "fuel jettison". Sometimes you have to make an emergency descent and the plane is too heavy (or too dangerous to carry so much fuel). From the ground it would look like "chemtrails". You can look up videos of this on YouTube.

The plane crashed shortly after takeoff in a populated area. Dropping 100 tons of fuel or tanks on buildings is not good.

Large jets can usually dump fuel but this is something that takes time. It's sometimes used in less urgent situations where the plane can still fly safely, like a landing gear malfunction or single engine failure.

That takes at least 10 minutes, and more like 30+ on a large plane like the B787.

Source: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1456931

That would create a trolley problem dilemma of its own, especially over populated areas.

Now I'm picturing a plane ejecting its wings and somehow sticking the lawn dart landing.

No.

Some aircraft allow fuel dumps but it is a slow process and done at higher elevation relative to the ground.

Nyt gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/12/world/india-plane-cr...

I'm intently following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171

Any discussion about causes is going to be pure speculation right now. It's too early. But the Wiki article is pretty good to get an overview. Some interesting discussion on its talk page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Air_India_Flight_171

Wikipedia is far from perfect, but in situations like this it is kind of incredible how well it can work

Seems like they lost power? https://x.com/georgiameloniii/status/1933091545248641248

There's a better, longer video on Reddit. At the beginning of the video, it sounds like the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) is deployed, which would suggest a dual engine failure.

Dual engine failure with a stall right at the end as it's going in.

Guessing it's either a foreign object ingested into both engines, probably a bird strike, or fuel starvation.

Here's a Reddit video: https://www.reddit.com/r/ahmedabad/comments/1l9i1ga/om_shant...

And here's a YouTube video showing a Ram Air Turbine (RAT) being deployed on a 787 for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBCGf50Trc&t=69s

I'm assuming the Ram Air Turbine gives extra evidence of a dual engine failure (or at least the engine that generated power). Engine spools down, power is lost, air turbine needs to be deployed.

Yeah, I believe the RAT is automatically deployed when both engines fail or when there's a critical loss of pressure in the hydraulic systems.

I don't see the RAT deployed on the video on Reddit. Can you tell the timestamp to zoom in? I'm super curious.

Those things are tiny and very transparent (since it's pretty much a propeller) and video compression, plus it's a video of a screen, will eat it up against a clear sky.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GtPFDrnbAAA6c68?format=jpg&name=...

It could be the blurry object under the fuselage, just to the right of the left engine.

From another video, the RAT on the 787 is on the right.

New videos came out and so far the prevailing theory is that flaps were retracted too soon. Most likely instead of gear up.

Going OT: why a parody account of Italian PM is tweeting a video about an airplane accident in India? Really weird

Because Twitter is a very weird and inauthentic place.

People always tweet trending stuff for popularity as simple as that

But this seems a "first hand" content, not a retweet.

Could be something as simple as a follower sending the video to the account knowing it will be shared

It could simply be reposted from another site or downloaded from a tweet and uploaded without attribution.

The account is run from India.

That raises even more questions.

It's very common, ever since twitter added monetization. It makes the site a lot more unbearable.

To be fair, you kinda gotta be on the outside of something to make good humor about it.

Not really, this is more of an internet meme [1].

[1] - https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pm-modi-responds-to-it...

Sometimes it's hard to tell the truth about what obviously just happened so all you can bear to do is say something unreasonably optimistic.

jesus, that's terrifying. The pilot has control of the plane all the way down but nowhere to even attempt a landing. All he can do is raise the flaps, deploy the landing gear and hope for the best.

Although TBH it also seems like a failure of city planning, aren't most major airports outside of the limits of the city they're associated with because of stuff like this? I know most of them don't have anywhere safe to attempt an emergency landing immediately after leaving the runway but at least there aren't a bunch of homes and office buildings.

No, they’re not. Of the 20 largest airports in the US, all but one of them have homes and offices surrounding them. The one that doesn’t is Denver, that’s mostly only because Denver’s airport is relatively new and the development hasn’t reached it yet.

that's actually not true and it's very easy to disprove because SFO is in the top 20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i....

I'm sure this is an airport most of the people on this site are familiar with but just in case you aren't, it's on reclaimed land in the San Francisco bay.

It is 400m from the threshold of 19L/1R to the nearest residential neighborhood at SFO. LGA, which is an incredibly urban airport has the exact same distance from the end of its closest runway to the nearest residential area.

There’s a massive, incredibly dense neighborhood of houses and offices less than 1000 feet to the south, west, and north of every one of SFOs runways.

SFO is surrounded by numerous highways, office buildings, and residential areas

well yeah but im talking about the part where the planes land not the terminal.

There runway thresholds are closer to the neighborhoods than the entire terminal except a few A terminal gates.

Go look at a satellite view of SFO.

Most major airports were established long ago (sometimes centuries ago) in land that used to be remote. Cities eventually expand into the surrounding area.

They put airports where there is room to put them. Frequently that means that they are well outside cities since finding space for a few 2 mile runways in the city is difficult.

However, there are plenty of airports in major cities and built up areas (in both developed and developing countries), and I have never heard of avoiding building in areas due to the (remote) possibility of crashes.

This is India we are talking about. The population density and surrounding encroachment is usually why even small domestic cylinder blast could take lives of 100s.

Did the Italian PM really say "I pray all passengers are safe" after posting that fireball?

It seems to be a parody account

its a parody account

I believe this is the first hull loss of a Boeing 787.

FlightRadar24 shows them doing an intersection departure with only half the runway.

Assuming this is accurate I would think this is a terrible idea in a large, heavy aircraft (and I realize they might not have been heavy for this flight).

When I was flying I would regularly hear airliners refuse intersection departures past a few hundred feet from the end of the runway due to company SOPs.

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/vt-anb#3ac3097f

ADS-B at that airport seems very inaccurate, if you look at previous departures there are a bunch of planes misplaced.

they backtracked and used the full runway

Baseless speculation and very unproductive comment. At least show some takeoff calculations and perhaps don't speculate with confirmed unreliable ADS-B data

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A sad case. Once they find the data boxes and inspect the data and voice records of the crew they might arrive at an answer. Unlike the USA, India as well as China prioritise political aspects above facts. This leads to the danger of hidden facts that show any officer is at fault. They also have a rigid hierarchy so if a senior officer makes an error, a junior officer dares not correct him and cause the senior to lose 'face'. This has caused plane crashes in India/China in the past.

India has an aviation safety record the past 20 years nearly as good as USAs. Your comment isn’t helpful.

I do not agree

Indian civil aviation market is pretty safe, given the amount of air travel in that country. Curious do you any data to back up your claims? The only case I Know of Junior Office/Senior office air crash was a Korean airline crash.

one dude sitting in 11A jumped out & survived pretty much unharmed. This was the Emergency Exit.

https://x.com/indiatoday/status/1933160181871099943?s=46

Given the fake news that came out of India after Sindoor, with the government insisting no fighters were lost even after third-party confirmation from France and the US, I'm hesitant to believe a purported "sole survivor" silver lining narrative when the only evidence is a few still photos and some brief video clips, especially in the age of AI.

The comment is quite stupid given the context. But I’ll play. The government never denied fighters were lost in the early days they just didn’t confirm it either. They did confirm it later though.

I will reserve my judgement but Boeing can’t catch a break.

Sure they can, they're contracted to design America's next-generation F-47 fighter jet!

And hell, after the sexy beast they call the X-32 I can't see why you wouldn't want their designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32

And Air Force One? Unless Qatari one gets its spot.

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

They are in the market but they depend on engines and other components manufactured elsewhere...

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Aerospace-Defense-Industrie...

They have, but the only potential Dreamliner competitor on the horizon, the C929, won't enter service until 2030 at the earliest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac#Products

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

Serious response: COMAC, the "Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China" (1) are working on it, but the competitor C929 aircraft (2) is not expected before 2030.

And they have produced smaller aircraft (3), but but the numbers produced so far are not impressive.

In other words, you're correct that it's not "if" but "when". And that it's a hard task, but they are working on it. The Jet engines seem to be the major hurdle.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C929

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919

Temu is in a great position to enter this market. Being deeply connected to the supplier networks, they could easily put together a plane and become a competitor to Boeing.

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You have absolutely no idea what caused this crash (which looks a lot like a bird strike) and yet you’re calling for people to be jailed.

I don’t know why people are always so quick to say whistleblowers are being purposely murdered.

At any rate we need to wait to understand the details of this crash, so far sounding like engine failure possibly due to bird strikes.

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“Now you know why.” - why even respond like this? You took some general statistics not specific to the population of people who are whistleblowers and just matter of factly make it a truth. It’s about as ridiculous as saying the person is murdered without any proof which I guess aligns with your thought process.

Being a whistleblower is ostracizing. Your colleagues and friends might no longer associate with you. It may put you in financial and family stress. You are in the news, you need to testify potentially. Sounds like a high stress situation.

I don’t know what is fact or fiction in this case but I can also assume some percentage of the population that do decide to become a whistleblower may also have other stresses or crises going on that maybe further their motivation to become a whistleblower. I say this cautiously because I don’t know this case specifically.

>"Now you know why.” - why even respond like this?

Because you wrote "I don't know why".

>Being a whistleblower is ostracizing. [...]

Sure! That's already factored in the suicide statistic.

The why respond like this is because you lack citations and provided an opinion that is not intuitive. Enlighten us instead of speaking like it’s all fact and share sources. You only stated suicide rates in the over 60 group and did not mention whistleblowers. You are again speaking on such authority without citing your supposed well known data.

I have looked before and have never seen specific studies on suicide rates in whistleblower groups but there is an awful lot of studies suggesting higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. Again I don’t know this case well but until there is evidence of murder it feels like MAHA feelings instead of science. I can think of a number of cases in recent history where the whistleblower has committed suicide, everytime people talk about it being murder but zero proof. Happy to be corrected but also tired of conspiracies.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6604402

https://thesignalsnetwork.org/whistleblower-john-barnetts-li...

This is the first fatal crash of a 787.

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...

Still wild speculation, but at least a high proportion of it informed.

The Guardian live article has a video showing the crash:

Direct link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...

This is the full video of take off to crash: https://x.com/ShivAroor/status/1933165937399648447

Just my personal observations of the video, I'm in no way qualified to speak on the matter.

There's a large plume that looks like smoke to me looks like smoke (could be dust/sand being blown away but I wouldn't think you'd see that much from a busy runway) visible off the left side of the runway. The plane is obscured by that structure when it happens but it looks like it's created at the same time that the plane is leaving the ground.

It looks like the plane stops accelerating completely at that same moment without any change in orientation which, in my head, looks like both engines suffered total failure at the same time.

From my limited knowledge (mostly from Mentour Pilot YT videos), that seems consistent with what you'd see if the plane flew through a large flock of birds that are spread out enough that both engines would be hit at the same time.

Again, purely speculation on my part based solely on what I see in this 1 video.

"AI crash" results are about to get wild.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c626y121rxxo

Goes through the usual speculations. However it mentions interesting the region has a high number of bird strikes.

Some interesting conversations here in this thread https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-cr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUFS2np0mKc&ab_channel=Pilot...

It surely can’t be a coincidence that the sole survivor was sat next to the emergency exit. I still can’t fathom how he walked away from that, though. Or even got out the plane alive.

If you look at the photo a large chunk of plane was stuck in the building https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/world-news/2025/06/1...

I guess he was just lucky to be in a bit sticking out rather than crushed?

It looks like that runway is relatively short, is it perhaps near the length of runway required to get a plane like that off the ground?

The Boeing Dreamliner link was marked as dupe... can you please make that the main one? This link doesn't even contain the plane type

You have to email the mods for them to make fixes like this.

Compressor stall. Inexperienced FO shuts down the wrong engine. They then mishandle the other one somehow. Crash.

Friends from the city told me it crashed into hostel or mess hall of a medical college.

These are 240 people killed. When will Boeing be sued for negligence?

This is the 4th within less than a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_aircraft_acc...

And there were 7 in one year during 2018 and 2019.

Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. Considering how many planes are currently in the sky at this very moment, this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.

> Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. > this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.

I can read too. I added a comment with a number. You don't know my intent, this is your interpretation.

Besides, 2018/19 was a steep outlier with the 737 MAX crashes. This is why these got widespread attention and have been discussed down to the last detail for years.

We're on 4, and only halfway through the year. We're on track to exceed 7.

4 in the last year (365 days), not calendar year.

Post-covid, aren't there considerably fewer planes in the skies? When i look up, the skies seem remarkably empty, compared to previously.

Anecdotally there seems to be a bit more air traffic in around Chicago versus 2019, but perhaps I just notice flights overhead more now as I commute downtown far less. This site shows current ORD volume at roughly 2019 levels:

https://chicagoairportguide.com/statistics/

Avherald seems overwhelmed. Any other sources for more information?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zi0HHGA4Ak&ab_channel=Pilot...

Is it an old or the newer aircraft?

The plane was 11 years old if Wikipedia is correct.

From the videos online, it looks like the plane stalled.

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And as somebody married to someone from India, I doubt a lack of English proficiency is the reason.

you don't have to doubt :) , English proficiency is the norm in professional jobs in India. Not to native levels but certainly more than sufficient for jobs like a pilot.

Indian Alien here. I'd suggest more sleep. I would bet a fair amount of $ that average scores of Indian kids who take GRE / SAT would be higher than citizens born in, ahem, God's Own Country. Admittedly, those would be kids from the middle / upper middle class. To afford pilot school you'd need to be from those sections anyway, or from the air force. So I'd not consider language to be a factor here. Although as the top comment says, wait a week or two. Or maybe more.

Off topic, as someone who travels to India 1-2X per year .. it's more common to see women Indian pilots. I'm only mentioning this unusual stat as your comment shows a kind of regional bias.

Isn't English quite prevalent in India?

Hindi and English are considered the two main languages in India. (Officially, it's a lot more complicated than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_recogn...). So yeah, this comment is misinformed.

Indeed. For those of a social class to become pilots, it's probably their native language.

Lots of good counterarguments here but I was speaking in more general terms. Whoops. Glad to learn that it was likely not a factor in this case due to English prevalence.

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That’s utter nonsense. How would that even work? Does gravity act differently in the “equatorial old world”?

The previous poster could have worded their comment much better, but shoddy maintenance, dodgy fuel etc absolutely are a real issue in developing countries.

Air India has a reasonable safety record, but in most all other aspects they're widely recognized as being a shambles.

>gravity

I’m going to assume this comment is sarcasm.

Anyone with a reasonable amount of exposure to physics in the region has been witness to innumerable Bollywood documentaries that illustrate the many gravitational anomalies present in the vicinity of the subcontinent.

Probably another example of slipshod Boeing engineering failing to anticipate the gravitational and mass related endemic conditions. They should have done more testing.

I think he's implying that countries near the equator are underdeveloped and thus the crash could have been caused by human factors (such as negligence)

As opposed to the predictable accidents of the Amazon and Guyanan basins?

Apart from the casual racism of lumping together areas of three continents in your generalisation, it was lazy racism as at 23 degrees North, Ahmedabad is close in latitude to Florida and far outside the 5-10 degree equitorial zone.

Have you been to Florida?

Latin America doesn't have as much high end aviation going on to fall out of the sky and the factions that are competing with the government for control in the new world are less inclined to slip explodey things onto flyey things than the ones in the old world.

I'm flattered you think I'm racist. I assure you I allocate my hate based on the contents of their mind than the color of their skin. I only have so much hate to go around and there's no reason to waste hate on people who don't need it.

> Latin America doesn't have as much high end aviation

What are you talking about?

> I assure you, I hate people far more based on the contents of their mind than the color of their skin.

You're fooling yourself here. Your absurd (and factually incorrect) assumptions about whole regions is textbook racism.

>What are you talking about?

What are you talking about?

Like FFS, seriously.

Look at the population numbers. Look at the number of arrivals and departures of the kind of large "international newsworthy when they crash" aircraft. There is simply less chance one falls out of the sky in LatAm because there's many fewer of them in the sky to begin with.

>You're fooling yourself here. Your absurd (and factually incorrect) assumptions about whole regions is textbook racism.

You are projecting your own judgements into my words. These nations are poorer and a lot of baggage comes with that. None of which has anything to do with race.

> You are projecting your own judgements into my words.

No, I'm reading your words as you write them.

Deciding that Ahmedabad is "right on the edge" of the "the equatorial old world" is racist unto itself. It shows staggering geographic and cultural ignorance.

Some self-reflection is in order, because if you speak like this in real life, people may not call you out directly but everyone will think less of you.

Gravity?

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Remember last year when a Boeing engineer whistleblower urged the company to ground all 787 Dreamliners?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/16/boeing-whis...

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.

Yes, I saw on news a pilot who regularly flies to this airport mention bird strikes as a potential cause given the bird problem in that area.

I'm very disappointed that in India this aspect is being ignored. It should stimulate local/state/central govt to solve the slum, urban garbage etc kind of problems.

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You've stated a fact in such a way that the audience is intended to draw a very specific conclusion.

Yeah, it's a Reddit-tier anti-intellectual cop-out.

You did better. You just asked a question!

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

What!? I only asked ... geesh

737 Max also had stellar records and then they started crashing one after other. Boeing has earned this reputation. Also as per information from twitter pilot did called mayday immediately after takeoff, so high chance of technical issues in aircraft.

The two are not remotely comparable. The 737 MAX entered commercial service in mid-2017 and had fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, both with aircraft that were only a few months old, out of a total fleet in the tens of aircraft.

The Telegraph has come up with another (somewhat odd) whistleblower story. For all we know so far, it could just as well be bird(s) strike(S).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/12/whistleblower-ra...

Just fell out of the sky. Whatever went wrong clearly wasn't save-able via pilot skill

There’s a WSJ report with a free link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255817

Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

The US flys significantly more than any country in the world and operates the most Boeing airplanes including the 737 and 737 Max, yet there hasn't been a single major accident like this and the Max crashes in the US.

Are these planes not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes as much as in the US?

You are comparing the US pop 350m (?) to rest of the world pop 8850m. Sure planes per capita are higher in US but it's an unfair comparison.

Not to say there isn't something there to dive into with data and some countries are safer than others to fly. And definitely some airlines than others.

Yeah, but the US puts significantly more miles on these planes and yet not a single accident has happened. So it's not the plane, unless these foreign airlines are getting the defunct planes. It has to be either poor maintenance or poor pilot training.

Definitely maintenance, pilot training, language, airport feature, topography and climate will factor in.

Id rather look at it in the lens of "is this flight I am booking safe enough" over "US is safer than Non-US"

> Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

I suppose US Airways 1549 wasn't American, then. I wonder what the 'US' in the name was for, then. If the bird strike had happened earlier in the flight where the plane would've had less altitude and speed, a very similar result to AI171 could've happened.

Or more recently, I suppose DCA isn't in the US either, and PSA Airlines isn't American.

This comment is subliminal racism disguised as thoughtful 'are these pilots not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes', when the corrupt cesspool that is the US somehow churned out the disaster of an aeroplane system that was MCAS.

What a bell-end of a commenter.

> there hasn't been a single major accident like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

> American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after lifting off the runway at Chicago O'Hare Airport [...] The accident was attributed to improper maintenance procedures. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

> American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, just after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo. The first officer's overuse of the rudder in response to wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines 747 was cited as cause. All 260 people on board, as well as five people on the ground, died from the crash

I'm going to downvote you now.

The first was in 1979, back when planes crashed left and right everywhere.

The second, in 2001, remains the last major accident in the US.

I'm not talking about accidents from 40 and 20 years ago. I'm talking about the recent 737 accidents both this one and the previous Max crashes.

What you're doing is running your mouth and implying there's some sort of magic that makes the USA -- probably the country you live in -- special. All other countries must obviously be inferior, incompetent, in comparison to the glorious USA.

That's not how planes work, that's not how aviation safety is advanced. There have been hundreds of accidents and there's no value in cherry-picking specific timeframes (while not actually stating you were cherry-picking until challenged on it), nor specific categories of accident (fatal accidents with hull loss only).

This is not the right way to view it: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262867/fatal-civil-airli...

THIS is the right way to view it: https://www.panish.law/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/PSBR-Aviat...

So is this: https://accidentstats.airbus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/...

And this (page 8): https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/compa...

(and if you want to apportion geographic blame - for Boeing airframes only - check out pages 17-24)

When there are accidents, the right thing to do is to analyse how it happened, come up with findings that might reduce the likelyhood of it happening again, or eliminate it, and push all people in aviation to adopt those findings - whether it be manufacturer, ATC, airline, or pilot, and regardless of country.

>Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

And why is it always Boeing planes?

I'm not sure, my guess is maybe foreign pilots are less fimilar with Boeing planes. The reason for the Max crashes from the past was due to the pilots not getting enough training on the new plane and made assumptions about it based on the previous generation plane. It wasn't the actual plane that was bad it was Boeing training wasn't good enough for pilots to understand the changes they made.

There is a grain of truth but your position is inaccurate. Boeing split off important software systems on the 737 MAx into paid upgrades. That’s not a training issue.

Pilots didn't get new training because Boeing (tried to) design it not to need new training.