CCTV footage accessed and verified by the Associated Press showed Air India flight 171 bound for London taking off and crashing into a medical college in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad on Thursday, killing more than 180 people in one of India's worst airline disasters in decades.
One theory circulating online is that the pilots may have accidentally retracted the flaps instead of the landing gear. Apparently that would result in kind of a flight path seen on the published videos.
While this cannot be confirmed or ruled out with the information we have, in my opinion the available videos seem to kinda support this theory. Initially the aircraft appears to take off and climb normally, but for some reason the gear is not being retracted when usually it would be retracted right after the takeoff.
Naturally the gear could be forgotten or left intentionally down if there were a dual engine failure right after takeoff, for example, but as the videos show no evidence of this, I’m more inclined to believe in simple pilot error.
I did see one person commenting on the other video that they could see the flaps were in the wrong position. And it is conspicuous that the landing gear was not retracted - though could that be because the pilots realized they were in trouble and would need to attempt a crash landing, or were too busy with whatever else had gone wrong?
Are the 787’s controls arranged in such a way that you could accidentally retract the flaps instead of the landing gear?
Not in a sense that someone could just grab the wrong lever in the dark for example. The levers are in different parts of the cockpit and also shaped very differently. But we humans can do all kinds of weird mistakes that are hard to explain. Almost everyone has experienced this sometimes. Think something like searching for you phone while it’s in your hand. Afterwards it’s very hard to explain why would anyone do such a silly mistake but it still happened. This would be similar.