If it's Boeing I ain't going

The video shows a plane, wings level, flaps still out, gear extended

Double engine failure?

The engines are not Boeing. Or Rolls Royce. They are GE.

It’s said that the aircraft’s airspeed was 174kt, easily flying speed. It did seem to have a nose-up attitude.

Video here:

I would recommend waiting for the inquiry rather than having an extended debate here as to what may or may not have happened. I am sure this recommendation will not be followed but I will ignore the thread.

Theo

Looked more like the arse-end sinking, than the nose-end climbing?

It did before it crashed. The video I saw showed a pull back to about 15 degrees nose up but looking more like a flare out for landing

If you look, you can see the *tops* of the wings indicating a fair amount of nose up and increasing...

You know as well as I do that at 174 knots that amount of nose up is a climb. Ergo it wasn't going that fast. Maybe at the apogee it was, but not afterwards.

They had time to issue a Mayday, but nothing else.

To me it *looks* like a normal takeoff and a climb to 600ft at climb out speed, followed by total loss of all engines.

They didn't even have time to pull the undercarriage and flaps up.

The engines are still attached, but don't seem to be producing power. And the noise seems to fade away too. Nor are they on fire.

Unless they were deliberately shut down by an act of terrorism, its hard to say what except a double bird strike might have done it.

I am not so sure.

The uspcaled video appears to show no flaps and one commentator asks a pertinent question

"What’s a Dreamliner do on takeoff if flaps are selected up instead of gear?" and "Speculation: too early rotation due to rwy end approaching (too) fast-then mistakenly retracts flaps instead of raising the gear.... That would result in what we saw in the video... Pure speculation in this rumour network. A sad day indeed..."

It fits the facts but it has to be a bloody sloppy takeoff to do that in midday heat with a full plane

And IF it reached 170 knots and 600 feet there was nothing wrong with the takeoff. 140 knots is typical rotation speed

AFAICT flaps 15 and leading edge slats is takeoff config. Hard to tell if there was 15 flaps or not.

I dont know where gear up is typically requested, but it seems like they never got to that point.

Yet the first thing a pilot is trained to do if he loses one engine is rudder, full TOGA power and retract the wheels

They can fly on one engine.

So we can conjecture that they hit issues with both engines shortly after takeoff.

They crashed 1 mile from the end of the runway. At 140+ knots, that's only around 30 seconds flight time.

Maybe, a few seconds after take off, they realised they were inevitably going to crash, in which case keeping the undercarriage down seems marginally preferable?

Faulty avionics, like Kegworth ?

WTF clog-up a DIY discussion forum with an aviation news report?

If you must add to the pointless speculative noise about accidents then better to do so on PPRUNE, which seems to have an ever-increasing number of non-PPs (Professional Pilots) so one more won't make much difference. Alternatively, perhaps it would be more sensible to wait for the accident report.

Eh? Pilots turning the non-damaged engine off ...

Wasn't Kegworth caused because one engine failed (it happens) and there was a fault in the (very new) control systems that caused the pilot to shut down the working engine with tragic consequences ?

Spontaneous double engine failure is extremely unlikely.

not quite, one engine problem, smoke in cockpit, pilots were familiar with older model where cabin air came only from one side's engine, they didn't use checklists, so they incorrectly inferred which engine smoke was from and shut it down, however on newer planes air came from both sides, so they'd turned off the remaining good engine.

Classic I wanna climb but my engines just quit...

-- There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy.

It's possible. But Kegworth was not faulty instrumentation. For reasons the pilots shut down the *wrong* engine

No, they shut down the wrong engine because the smoke in the cockpit led them to believe it was the engined supplying cabin pressurisation. But the new aircraft used the other engine for *cockpit* air...

Never said it was 'spontaneous'. Flocks of birds are a real hazard below about 1000ft.

I agree. Or at least it would make no difference.

Yes, I've just (re) learned ...

No, but I suggest it is "spontaneous". Because planned failure 30 seconds after take off seems a bit dim.

What are the chances of double bird-strike ? I know "anythings possible", but I would have imagined there would be serious attempts to prevent it.

They had filled her up hadn't they ?

High. That's what happened to the plane that landed in the river. Also to another one this year IIRC.

First passenger to survive says

"Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly."

Cockpit voice recorder will be interesting. Also black box. I imagine they will have a preliminary report in a couple of weeks to stop idle 'It's a Boeing' speculation as much as anything

COULD have been a bomb inside, but no signs of damage in the video