Air India crash: the questions over Boeing’s safety record have been mounting for years

On Thursday at 9.08am BST, an Air India flight took off from Ahmedabad airport bound for London Gatwick. Almost immediately after take-off, the cockpit gave a mayday call. The Flight AI171 only reached 625 feet before rapidly losing altitude. After 32 seconds in the air, the plane crashed into a hostel housing medical students.

At 10.31am, a journalist from an Indian news channel posted photographs of an unredacted flight manifest – which included the names, nationalities, and passport numbers of most of the passengers on the flight. Three minutes later, the complete version was published by an Indian wire service, which has since deleted the post. This happened as response teams were only beginning to sift through the wreckage.

Social media users quickly identified one of the British couples on the manifest and found their Instagram accounts. By 11.09am, a self-styled news account that claims to be powered by AI had shared what is believed to be a final video of the pair describing their love of India as they waited to board. This was three hours before Ahmedabad’s police chief gave the BBC a first count of how many bodies had been recovered from the site.

Several UK media outlets described the couple as “named” throughout the afternoon, without saying by whom. A family member confirmed they were on board at 5.29pm.

Flight manifests contain highly sensitive information, especially in the wake of plane crashes. They are vital in tracking down passengers, confirming their identities, and contacting families. It is not known who took photos of the AI171 manifest or what judgements were made by the social media accounts who chose to circulate it on social media.

All but one of the 242 passengers were killed. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British man seated next to the emergency exit, was the sole survivor.

The people onboard included two pilots and 10 cabin crew. The passengers included 217 adults, 11 children and two infants, according to Reuters. Of the passengers, 169 were Indian nationals, 53 were Britons, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian, Air India said.

It may take years to determine the cause of the crash, although Ramesh told the Hindustan Times he heard a loud bang before the Boeing 787 Dreamliner went down. The plane was built in 2013 and had logged more than 41,000 flight hours.

This is the first fatal crash involving a Dreamliner, which despite safety concerns had an exemplary record in the air before Thursday. While investigations are ongoing, Boeing will be under heavy scrutiny. Its shares dropped nearly 5 per cent yesterday.

The company has struggled to recover its reputation since two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes crashed in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, killing nearly 350 people in total.

Just last month, it agreed a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice in return for $1.1 billion in fines and an admission that it obstructed the investigation into the Indonesia crash. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found that Boeing had not given pilots proper training on new software on the planes.

On the 737 Max and the production of other models, the company has been accused – and has always denied – compromising the safety of its planes in favour of profits.

Whistleblowers told the US Senate in 2024 that the Boeing 737 Max 8, which was grounded for nearly two years before resuming service, was still not airworthy.

Boeing also denied the claims of a former quality engineer, Sam Salehpour, who said the company was “taking manufacturing shortcuts” on the 787 programme and “putting out defective airplanes”.

In May of last year, the FAA opened a new investigation into the Dreamliner after the company admitted it may not have completed required inspections. At the time the agency said that Boeing was inspecting all 787 planes within its production system.

There is no evidence yet to suggest that a manufacturing problem was behind yesterday’s disaster. Most aviation accidents are down to pilot error. But a string of fatal crashes and longstanding concerns about Boeing’s corporate culture mean the company is unlikely to get the benefit of the doubt – not as the internet already scours footage for answers.

Photographs by CISF via AP, Rafiq Maqbool/AP