What made Boeing 787s popular – and later a cause for concern Premium

Air India flight AI171 crash details, Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner design, engine specifics, and safety concerns explained.

At 1.38 pm on June 12, Air India flight AI171 bound for London from Ahmedabad crashed five minutes after taking off just outside the Ahmedabad airport. The flight had 230 passengers and 12 crew. Videos of the incident showed a large orange fireball erupting moments after the crash at the site in Meghaninagar.

The exact cause has yet to be identified or ascertained.

The AI171 flight was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, a wide-bodied aircraft powered by twin jet engines. The design, introduced in the late 2000s, was part of the wider aircraft industry’s trend towards aircraft with more electrical parts in order to improve operational efficiency.

Earlier this year, Boeing celebrated 787-8 aircraft worldwide carrying 1 billion passengers in 30 million flight-hours. There are currently more than 1,170 aircraft of this variety operating around the world. Air India 171 represents the first major incident involving a 787-8 flight.

When it was first introduced in 2011, the 787-8 was touted as a gamechanger because it had specific advantages that promised to move the industry in a new direction. Later, however, its reputation came to be marred by problems with the carbon composites used for the aircraft, grounding orders over lithium-ion battery packs onboard, and concerns over the company’s quality control practices.

In fact, on June 12, U.S. President Donald Trump’s new nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Bryan Bedford, vowed to hold Boeing accountable over “the failure of a key safety system tied to two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people,” Reuters reported.

Dreamliner 787-8 aircraft use the General Electric GEnx or the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines. Both these engines are turbofans: they combine an air-breathing jet engine with a ducted fan.