I don’t know how much additional drag the landing gear pose, but one of the most glaring things is that this Air India jet never retracted its gear at any point. Most airliners retract gear immediately after takeoff.
I wonder if the loud bang that the survivor reported was some sort of malfunction related to the gear mechanisms, a malfunction (hydraulic or whatnot) that wouldn’t permit the gear to be stowed and retracted.
Nice video, to a point. I guess it’s too much to have people point the camera at what they want to record?
Planes can fly w/ gear down & routinely do so for the last couple of miles before landing. However, if there was a bigger issue (possibly flaps not generating enough lift) & alarm bells going off the pilots should be attempting to rectify that crisis first before worrying about the gear.
Nah, I posted speculation. Best to delete.
Apparently at least one survivor made it, is lucid and gave a brief statement from his hospital bed.
Seeing the fireball I can not believe anyone survived that crash, much less that he is making statements and not in ICU. If it is true he is a very fortunate person.
The BBC have spoken to his family who said they spoke to him by phone. He apparently walked out the wreckage!
Unbreakable II.
Exactly what I thought. That did not look like a survivable fuel explosion.
I’ll wait for confirmation he was actually on the plane. It could be someone on the ground who wants publicity for some reason.
If he was forward in the plane, the forward part may have separated from the rest of the plane where the fuel mostly is.
Unfortunately, it’s possible many people on the ground were killed or hurt, too.
This is why I like to pick a seat where I can see the wings and start screaming “FLAPS! FLAPS!” if they start the roll without extending them.
Perhaps the survivor got away from the plane before it burst into flames. I once had to do an emergency evacuation of a 747, and
Fortunately, they will have no problem recovering the recorders. They should tell the tale.
There have been disasters where even experienced crews failed in this manner. In any case, the term “belly flop” indicates a stall.
Unbelievably, the BBC have just showed footage of the survivor WALKING to the ambulance and interacting with passers by.
That’s exactly why I don’t like getting a wing seat (and of course, I always seem to somehow-- even when I choose my own seat and have a lot of choices I somehow fail to realize I’m picking a wing seat). I have little to no idea what a properly configured wing is supposed to look like, and when I see any dinged wing panel or chipped off area of paint, I always think ‘how well are they maintaining this contraption anyway?!?’
Not to mention, I don’t wanna be be looking out at 30,000 feet and seeing a gremlin on the wing 
(Maybe I shouldn’t be joking at a time like this, but I’m a historically nervous flyer, and humor is one way I cope with it – whistling past the graveyard and all)
Or, possibly, like the famous Air France 707 disaster of Flight 007 in 1962, failure of the elevators. The pilot pulled back on the yoke to take off, the plane preferred to stay on the ground.
The cause of this will be interesting, as accidents like this are so incredibly rare these days.
From the BBC>
The flight manifest shared earlier by authorities lists the passenger in seat 11A as Vishwashkumar Ramesh, a British national.
Indian media say they’ve spoken to Vishwash in hospital. He shared his boarding pass which showed his name and and seat number.
They reported him saying: “Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly.”
Interestingly enough, in some of the better quality videos floating around, two things stand out…
I’m going to break this link so as not to post a link direct to Twitter, but the plane sounds and looks like the propeller for the ram air turbine is deployed and that the engines are quiet or silent.
https://x. com/PlanesOfLegend/status/1933165930508362169
Well that is amazing. Unbreakable indeed.
“That’s gotta hurt.”