Michael Cerasa

😓 Air India 🇮🇳 Flight AI171 with fully loaded Boeing 787-7 Dreamliner fatal accident: I‘m an airline pilot with >15‘000h of experience and a physics institute: My brief PRELIMINARY analysis of the visible facts from the video of the takeoff: * The flaps are only slightly extended, presumably to position 1 instead of 5. * The landing gear is still extended, which should have been retracted at this altitude and causes additional drag. * The aircraft is at a high angle of attack, which confirms the insufficient flap setting. * From the video and witness accounts, only low engine noise is audible. * Neither smoke nor fire is visible. * An engine failure is less likely. The most probable cause is presumably a human factor, an incorrectly chosen, insufficient flap setting for takeoff, and consequently an inadequately selected thrust. In this context, the correlated speeds were too low because they were calculated for a larger flap setting or a lighter aircraft. As a result, the aircraft took off with insufficient speed and intentionally but falsely derated thrust, was therefore on the unstable side, and rapidly lost more speed and altitude due to the additional failure to retract the landing gear in a timely manner, leading to a subsequent stall at low altitude and crash. For the experts: the aircraft got onto the wrong side of the speed vs drag curve and maneuvered itself into a corner from where there is no escape. Another possible cause could also have been an incorrect input of a wrong takeoff weight into the Flight Management System, resulting in too low thrust and too low speeds. The pilots got startled after takeoff, couldn’t wrap their head around what went wrong and incorrectly prioritized making an emergency call instead of flying the aircraft first, manually increasing thrust immediately to maximum, and retracting the landing gear. In summary of this very early and preliminary assessment (your confidence level should be as low as mine): The most probable cause is human error 😓 - as most of the time these days. Not because the pilots got worse (although that effect can be observed as well with prioritization of diversity over competence) - but because technology got so much better.

Where is the Mike Johnson of 2023!?

On this date in 1995, Derek Jeter made his MLB debut for the Yankees in Seattle 👏 In his first big league series, the future Yankees captain would pick up the first 3 of his 3,465 career hits and the first of his 1,311 career RBI 🫡

Johni Broome standing vertical leap at the NBA draft combine

The American mind cannot comprehend this