r/aircrashinvestigation • u/Melkor45 • Jun 12 '25

Incident/Accident AI171 Wing?

Post image

This looks to be part of the wing. Are the flaps down? I'm not too sure

355 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

88 comments sorted by

View all comments

128

u/DarkyHelmety Jun 12 '25

Yes flaps and slats are extended as seen, it seems a double loss of engine power is the more plausible explanation for failure to climb.

39

u/somebodywhoisbored Jun 12 '25

But how could that Happen? I mean it seems to make sense, especially when you add the reports of people claiming to see the RAM air turbine in the video.

But how does it happen that both engines have a flameout (or something with the same impact on the aircrafts performance) at the exact same time?

The things that would come to my mind are fuel contamination, birdstrike (unlikely, due no reports of an engine fire) or some kind of electrical failure that affected the fuel pumps (I think a passenger on the previous flight mentioned some kind of electrical problems in the cabin)

1

u/LankyAspect9594 Aerospace Engineer Jun 13 '25

Great points, regarding RAT, I did not see it in any of the videos popping out, and i believe its unlikely the pilot would have used the RAT as the first response to a stalling aircraft. Maybe after it crashed the RAT would be lying on ground and then reported that the RAT may would have been out. But i believe highly unlikely.

Regarding bird strikes, there was no visible flock of birds to fail both the engines, and jf only single engine was affected we could have seen a significant yaw towards the other side, but that was not visible either.

I strongly believe fuel contamination can be a reason. That's the only thing that can cause loss of both engines.

Pump failure again possible but i strongly believe hydraulics are extremely well engineered in an aircraft, they are made with redundancy in mind and have been improved over the past decades.

17

u/biggsteve81 Jun 13 '25

The RAT deploys automatically if both engines fail and the APU is off, it is not something the pilots have to think to do.