hello this is BBC News i'm Katherine Bjang and I just want to bring you some breaking news now we're getting reports of a plane crash in India an Air India flight taking off from Ahmedabad International Airport crashed shortly after takeoff well today by all accounts is a very very bitter day in the aviation world and really around the world the tragic loss of life over in Abadabad uh India and I'm probably mangling that name I'm sorry but uh it was uh AI Air India Flight 171 shortly after takeoff and I mean shortly after takeoff lost all lift and the airplane crashed into a neighborhood uh everybody except for one on board so far that's the preliminary reports has perished in that flight and we don't know how many folks on the ground uh and so we're very uh just upset about that here uh it's not the sort of thing I want to talk about but uh a lot of you have asked uh you know what do I think happened and so uh let me jump into this i just got back from Athens i've been flying all day and um we've been looking at video for several hours now i've talked to a whole bunch of pilots today and I asked them what they thought happened and we've come up with basically three kind of categories of what we think happened and so let me break down all three cuz I think two are less likely uh than the third and I'm going to show you some video here uh that is very telling and it's telling not so much for what you see in the video but what you don't see in the video so let me explain all that as I unwrap all of this so we've got an episode here where it's a Boeing 787 a very reliable airplane this airplane has a great track record uh this is in fact the first whole loss of a Boeing 787 uh and tragically so and uh what I'm going to say here understand folks is really early in this uh we're going to be gathering information over the next few days uh remember it's my opinion i've got some theories based on the early findings here but rest assured as more information uh unfolds maybe the blackbox information comes out we will make additions and and deletions and corrections to anything that I say here but the three main theories revolve around the loss of lift of this airplane so I fly the Boeing trip 7 it's a very similar airframe uh to the Boeing 787 if anything the Boeing 787 is even more capable than the trip 7 and uh one of the things that we see in this first video that I'm going to show you is the airplane already in flight and then it gets into trouble and then it kind of flattens out the nose comes up the bottom drops out the back of the airplane drops out and it just kind of pancakes into the ground so let's take a look at the video and then I'm going to come back and talk about what we see and what we don't see okay there's the fireball we see the airplane come from left to right in our screen and the first thing we notice is that it's kind of flat at first and then the nose kind of rounds out now it's difficult i've heard a lot of people talking about the flaps on the airplane it's impossible from that distance to tell whether the flaps are out or whether the flaps are up and more importantly in at that gross weight for a 787 uh they would most likely be taking off with flaps five so what does that mean it means the leading edge devices on the front part of the wing the part that you don't see would be fully out and then five degrees of flap in the back but from this distance it's hard to say whether that 5° is out and honestly you'd have to be pretty close to the airplane to tell if there was any flaps out at all but this airplane does uh show characteristics of an airplane that doesn't have any flaps which is really perplexing it's a it's a headscratcher for sure so let me go back and and rewind this video and and take a look at what we see and I'm going to stop it here as the airplane comes into the frame the airplane looks to be kind of normal but what we do know is this the landing gear is still down now this airplane is well beyond the point of rotation and climb out where they would have raised the gear uh that's done at about 50 feet off the ground and so more on that in a minute uh what we also see is both engines we don't know if they're producing thrust but what we don't see out of the engines is any sort of flame any sort of sparks we don't see any indication that they're not operating normally now everybody's been talking about a power loss and I've I've watched a bunch of videos and and and people on the different channels talking about this uh and they say "Well it was a power loss and that's why the airplane descended and crashed." Let me be specific with this this was a loss of lift it could have been caused by a power loss so that's theory number one is that they lost power on both engines that caused the loss of lift the airplane stopped flying it started flying at one point it was flying normally as the nose lifted off before they raised the gear the airplane lost lift and stopped flying so what would have caused that well if both engines failed it was one of two things either they ran through a flock of birds and basically destroyed both engines at once the reason I don't think that's a likely theory is we don't see any birds in the in the picture it would had to be a lot of birds to foul out both engines and we don't see any indications coming out of the back of the engine that that happened you'd see flames you'd see sparks you'd see something as those engines were kind of coming apart it's smoke at a minimum so you don't see any of that stuff it looks as though the engines are intact and they're running they could have both flamed out because of fuel contamination that's the one thing that both engines would have in common is the fuel the problem with that theory at least in my opinion is that as they pushed up the power to go down the runway they would have had the indications of a sputtering engine if the fuel had been contaminated there's no indication that they did they roll down the runway and I'll show you that video in a minute they rotate at the normal speed they they take a nose up attitude which is really normal for that airplane at that speed everything else happens after that so I don't think they lost power on the engines now we could find out in a day or two that's exactly what happened and that's what caused the loss of lift but that's theory number one theory number two is that they took off without the flaps out they took up with flaps up the problem with that and it would it would be indicative of way the airplane kind of wallowed into the air and then came back down the problem with that theory is this they would have had to get through two complete checklists and not put the flaps down cuz two checklists on that airplane and they're electronic checklist they're integral to the airplane it's not like a paper checklist that you hold so the airplane literally will not let you taxi out and take off without the flaps deployed properly for that weight in that airport that you're at all that stuff is determined ahead of time so they would have had to override manually override both of those checklists then for some unexplained reason take the runway and once you put the power up in a 787 just like my trip 7 once you put the power up the airplane knows you intend to go flying if you're not configured for flight in other words your flaps are not deployed it makes a racket a big red light comes up and says config warning and then both master caution lights in front of both pilots flash and then a horn goes off and it's deafening it's inconceivable that they would have continued on with that takeoff roll with a configuration warning in front of them just to rotate and then flounder into the community off the end of the runway so is it possible that that was what happened it is possible same as with the power loss anything is possible here we don't have all the details here's what I think happened and let's take a look now at this other video i wanted to she show you the closed caption video of the airplane on the takeoff roll i'm going to run the whole thing we're going to bring it back and I'm going to show you in detail what I think happened all right right here right here beyond that little shack that's in between us and the airplane we see the airplane begin to lift up off of the runway everything up to this point looks completely normal there's no fire or sparks or anything coming out of the engines we can't tell from this distance whether those leading edge slats those flaps in the front are out or not and we really can't tell whether those five degree flaps in the back are out let's assume for a minute they are because why because the pilots would have had to overcome those flashing lights in their in their face and th those deafening horns going off in the cockpit to some for some explained reason to keep on going so they get to the a normal rotate spot they come up and the airplane naturally comes up to about 2 and 1/2° as the as the main mounts come up off the ground that's when in the back of the airplane you feel like a slight uh nose up and then at that point the pilot and let me run this a little bit farther see that two and a half degrees right there that's 2 and a half degrees they're off the ground right at this point the pilot not flying let's call them the co-pilot for a minute the co-pilot is going to say to the pilot flying positive rate that means that the main mounts are off the ground and the airplane is climbing normally once the co-pilot says uh positive rate the pilot then at the control says gear up at that point the other pilot reaches up raises the landing gear and gets those great big drag devices now called the landing gear up into the airplane to make the airplane more aerodynamic make it more slick the flaps are still out the airplane then rotates up to about 10 to 12 1/2° up and that's when in the back you feel it's like wow are we a rocket ship we're going straight up the airplane has plenty of lift over the wings has plenty of thrust going on and now those big landing gear the the um the drag devices now have been brought up into the airplane and man it takes off like a rocket that part never happens right here as we're looking at this airplane the gear should be coming up into the airplane it never does let me play it a little bit longer and then I'm going to tell you why I think it didn't right there is a point where the the pilot fly would normally bring the airplane up to about 12 degrees nose up the gear should be almost completely up into the airplane at this point it hasn't budged an inch you're going to see on a 787 the ends of the wings start to start to bend a little bit they usually bend a lot more than this airplane why because as the airplane's picking up speed and it's picking up lift over those wings those those composite wings really bend that is an indication a visual indication they're really getting a lot of lift this 787 is not getting a lot of lift right now but nothing's going on with the engines as far as I can see now let me continue with this at this point watch the nose it starts to go over right there it starts to come back over why is it doing that here's what I think happened and and again folks this is just my opinion this is a theory that one theory among many any of the others I could have shared with you up to this point could be absolutely right but why do I think this one is more likely than the other two here's why i think the pilot flying said to the the co-pilot "Gear up at the appropriate time." I think the co-pilot grabbed the flap handle and raised the flaps instead of the gear if that happened and this is a big if if that happened this explains a lot by of why this airplane stopped flying why the lift over the wings died because at that point now the flaps are retracting all that extra lift you're producing in the wings goes away you're already slow you already got the power pulled up all pushed up all the way this airplane's as heavy as it's ever going to be in this flight and you still got those great big landing gear out there producing all sorts of drag this is a bad combination at this point you see the nose now start to come over now why would the nose come over because the airplane is trying to create as much lift as it can over those wings and if the flaps are coming up it's going to nose over to get even more air flow over those wings that's going to be a very very uncomfortable feeling for the pilot at the controls why because he's losing air speed and he's going to begin to lose altitude now remember he thinks the gear has come up he might not know that the flaps came up he just sees a motion over next to him and he's looking outside going "Wait what's going on?" It's all very confusing and it all happens in a split second let's watch the airplane starts to settle in it starts to now descend you see the pilot start to pull the nose up a little bit more okay as he's getting closer to the ground he's probably got the power pushed up all he can and now I think he's going to get into a power on stall not enough lift is being produced by those wings all that drag is being produced by the landing gear that's still out there could anything have saved the day at this point maybe if they'd raised the gear maybe if they'd raised the gear and put the flaps back out uh but it's very unlikely that once this gets to this point that they can recover from it and now watch what happens the airplane begins to kind of wallow right the pilot pulls back even more on the nose that aggravates the whole thing and now you get this waddle into the ground and it's in a controlled power on stall until it impacts the ground if they had had 1500 ft or 1,000 ft even to lower that nose and gain that air speed back they might have been able to fly out of it they don't have the luxury i don't think this airplane got higher than 5 600 ft and then when they start to waddle down they're down at 200 feet they just can't lower the nose and the airplane just kind of does a power on uh descent into the ground so that's that's my theory now I could be completely wrong about this um but the flight characteristics look to me to be an airplane that doesn't have enough lift coming over the wings and the only way that could happen is if they didn't have the proper flap setting so what however they got to an improper flap setting it's inconceivable in my mind that they actually did that takeoff roll without the flaps out because the bells and the horns and everything else that would be going on at that point there's still no indication that that either of the engines failed and this airplane can fly just fine on one engine at any gross weight it will climb out no problem on one engines this so the idea that both engines failed at the same time again is like a billion a trillion to one u shot and uh you know now in the days to come we might find out that they did ingest a flock of birds into both and that we just didn't see any indication of it out the back of the engines it could have been fuel contamination that's a possibility but again it's very unlikely u a loss of power is not the same as a loss of lift a loss of power will contribute to a loss of lift but you can have a loss of lift without a loss of power and that would mean that the wing would have to be configured wrongly or poorly for that phase of flight this is the most critical phase of flight you're the heaviest you're ever going to be you're the slowest you're ever going to be and you have all your power up with within about 10% of your power you can push a little bit more up but you don't have a lot of reserve power all of those things are working against you and if you leave that big old landing gear out there man it really starts to cause a a drag effect that's going to cause the air speed to bleed off it's going to force that nose to come over you're going to start to lose altitude quickly the only thing the pilot can do as he sees the ground coming up is pull back on that nose and my friends it's it's very sad i I feel so sorry um for these pilots uh I think they tried valiantly to save this airplane uh but this may have been simply a tragic mistake now I hope that it wasn't i I I hope maybe there was some other explanation for it but hoping that it was a mechanical failure or some other uh explanation will not bring any of these people back and uh it's just sad it's been a very bitter uh time in aviation and we see now the loss for the first time of a 787 i hope uh in the long run that that's the last 787 crash we ever have to witness whether it was over in India or here in the US or over in the UK anywhere around the world um we don't want to have to do commentary on any of these such accidents now in the days to come as we get the blackbox information I've heard that the NTSB is going over to India to help i've heard Boeing is headed over there to help um we're going to hopefully get information sooner rather than later from those sources and as we do uh we will bring you additional information amplifying information and if I need to make a correction I'll be the first guy um to make a correction but this is very very early on this is what we know up to this point and uh as we get more information we'll share it with you as we go now you know i'm Captain Steve fly safe