Air India releases new details about two engines on doomed London flight

Air India has revealed that one of the two engines on the doomed Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flight that crashed seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad Airport was new, and the other wasn’t due for a service until the end of the year.“The right engine was a new engine put in March 2025,” the airline’s chairman N Chandrasekaran told the local Indian news channel, Times Now.“The left engine was last serviced in 2023 and (was) due for its next maintenance check in December 2025”.Investigations are underway into how the flight bound for London’s Gatwick Airport crashed into a medical students’ hostel last Thursday, killing at least 270 people.“There are a lot of speculations and a lot of theories,” Chandrasekaran said, “But the fact that I know so far is this particular aircraft, this specific tail, AI171, has a clean history.“I am told by all the experts that the black box and recorders will definitely tell the story.So, we just have to wait for that.”The plane’s two black boxes have been recovered allowing for analysis of the cockpit voice recorder, which captures audio including voices, alarms and background noises from the cockpit, and the flight data recorder, which logs flight parameters like engine performance and the plane’s speed and altitude.Chandrasekaran said that it may be a month before preliminary results of the investigation are available.He also said the flight’s captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, was very experienced with over 11,500 hours of flying experience behind him, while his first officer Clive Kunder, had more than 3,400 hours.“What I hear from colleagues is that they were excellent pilots and great professionals,” he said.

“So we can’t jump to any conclusions.”A team of experts from Boeing, engine supplier GE Aerospace and from the UK and US have joined the Indian-led investigation.Funerals have begun for the casualties of India’s worst aviation disaster in three decades.The sole survivor of the crash, 40-yea...