Business
What Caused the Air India Plane Crash? Here’s What Investigators Are Examining.
Investigators have begun sorting through the wreckage of Thursday’s plane crash in India, the nation’s deadliest in three decades. It could take months before a definitive explanation emerges, but videos of the accident and other evidence have begun to offer clues about what may have brought down the Air India flight, killing more than 260 people.
Here are some questions that investigators hope to answer in days and weeks ahead, according to aviation safety experts.
Were the wing flaps and slats properly extended?
Thursday’s crash occurred moments after the plane departed the airport in Ahmedabad, India. A short, blurry video showed what appeared to be the start of a routine takeoff, aviation safety experts said. But soon after leaving the ground, the plane, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, began to descend before crashing and exploding.
At its most basic, the crash reflected a failure to meet the fundamental requirements of flight. To fly, a plane needs to generate enough lift to overcome gravity and enough thrust to overcome the air’s resistance, known as drag. The flight on Thursday seemed to fail on both accounts.
“There appeared to be an issue with the thrust and there appeared to be an issue with the lift,” said Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation safety consultant. “And we unfortunately saw what the result was.”
When an airplane takes off, flaps at the rear of the wing and slats at the front are typically extended to provide more surface area to create more lift as the plane gains speed.
“Just given the fact that this was a takeoff accident, begs the question regarding the settings of the wing slats and flaps, which is critical for taking off in a big jet that’s fully loaded with fuel,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board.
It was not clear whether those flaps and slats were properly extended. If they weren’t, experts said, investigators will want to know why. Did the pilots choose not to extend them or fail to do so? Was there some kind of mechanical failure that prevented the pilots from extending those parts? Even if the slats and flaps were extended, it would be difficult to know if they were appropriately deployed because they can be configured differently for different situations. It’s also possible that they were extended but retracted too soon.
“The video is just too grainy, but that is something that’s clearly recorded in the flight data recorder,” said Mr. Guzzetti. “So hopefully, the recorders will tell the tale.”
Why was the landing gear down?
The video shows that the landing gear remained extended throughout the plane’s ascent and descent, which experts described as unusual. Landing gear creates drag, so retracting it is typically one of the first actions a plane’s pilots take after the plane is off the ground.
But experts said the pilots may not have retracted the gear for a number of reasons. A mechanical problem may have prevented the pilots from lifting the landing gear, for example. Or the pilots may have been preoccupied with another, more pressing problem.
“The airplane will climb fine leaving the gear down,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, a former accident investigator at the Air Line Pilots Association and an assistant professor of aviation safety at Ohio State University. If something else had gone wrong in the plane, the pilots may have focused on addressing that first, he said: “You have bells and alarms going off — there’s all kinds of stuff happening.”
Were there engine problems?
Engines provide thrust and investigators will want to know if they failed for any reason. An engine breakdown sometimes comes with telltale signs — smoke, fire, a flash — but experts said none of those are clearly apparent in the blurry videos of the crash.
One video shows what appears to be a dust cloud shortly after the plane leaves the ground. That could have been caused by an engine or it could have been caused by the wingtips disturbing the air, experts said.
Planes are designed to fly with just one engine, a situation that commercial airline pilots train for “excessively,” Mr. Pruchnicki said, adding that he believed the 787 Dreamliner probably didn’t experience a single engine failure, but both engines could have malfunctioned.
If that were the case, it would have happened at the “absolute worst time,” said Mr. Pruchnicki. A double engine failure occurring shortly after takeoff, when the plane was only several hundred feet off the ground, would have left the pilots without sufficient time to respond to the emergency.
“You can’t manage a double engine failure that close to the ground,” he said, recalling the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” when a US Airways jetliner landed in the Hudson River after the aircraft lost power in both engines after striking a flock of birds. “These guys were in a residential area, a business area. They had no place to go either. There was no field to set it down gently. So, unfortunately, they ended up in buildings.”
A failure of both engines could have many causes: a bird or drone strike, inadvertent fuel shut-off, issues with automated thrust management. There is no evidence that these problems played a role in Thursday’s crash.
“There’s easily a hundred different explanations of possibilities,” Mr. Pruchnicki said. Analyzing the flight data recorder and inspecting the engine itself would provide an “unbelievably forensic” look at what happened, he added.
What was happening in the flight deck?
Investigators will also probably be sharply focused on what unfolded in the flight deck, or cockpit, before the crash.
There were two pilots on the Air India flight, which is typical in commercial aviation, with one pilot in charge of flying and the other providing support, monitoring the plane’s various systems. Were those duties split appropriately? What were the pilots saying to one another? And did they perform their jobs adequately?
Planes are also equipped with various warning systems to alert pilots of problems. Investigators will want to know if those warning systems worked as intended.
“Did they get the warning that they were supposed to receive or were they misconfigured? If they didn’t get a warning, then why? If they did, what did the crew do when they heard it?” said Mr. Guzzetti.
What other sources of evidence are there?
Investigators will also be on the hunt for more evidence.
Typically, they scour and analyze wreckage for clues and collect testimony from witnesses, such as airport personnel who may have seen the crash. They will also look for additional videos.
But their most important task will be recovering the wealth of technical information and audio recordings contained in the plane’s black boxes: a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, both of which have been recovered.
“Once they have that information, it will help focus the investigation into specific areas,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot and chief executive of Safety Operating Systems, a consulting firm. “So right now, it’s about gathering of documentation and evidence and keeping an open mind.”
As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones.
A new survey of individuals using AI found it made them more productive, saving each roughly 11 hours per week. But at the same time, the workers on average have to spend more than six hours “botsitting,” checking the AI output, fixing mistakes and rerunning the prompt.
“Most people don’t realize the amount of time that they’re spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they’re professing,” said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara.
Leonardi is one of the co-authors of the new study published by the Work AI Institute, whose contributors include academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The institute is sponsored by AI company Glean. Leonardi said its research output maps broad trends in understanding AI’s impact on work.
The research surveyed 6,000 digital workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia between December and January.
The report found that we are in a phase of significant personal productivity gains, but few companies are translating these gains into revenue and business growth.
While 75% of individuals reported a boost in productivity, only 13% of the organizations say they have seen significant business gains as a result of AI adoption, the survey found.
The survey analyzed anonymized, aggregated workplace data from companies using the Glean Work AI platform, a private search tool used to manage their internal information.
Over the past six months, Silicon Valley companies have been urging their employees to max out their AI use . But the benefits of merely maximizing AI usage have been unclear, with instances such as Uber burning through their entire 2026 AI budget in four months, without shipping a usable feature.
The reason the boost in productivity sometimes leads to waste, Leonardi said, is the time people spend correcting the bot’s work and gathering the right files, documentation, and tacit knowledge required for it to produce high-quality output.
“It’s pretty striking the amount of time and effort people are spending,” Leonardi said.
Most employees now spend over six hours a week of their workday babysitting their work chatbots, the survey said.
There is a “thick, mostly invisible layer of human labor holding the whole thing together,” the report said.
The survey found that for every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable.
Of the total time workers spend interacting with AI each week, 37% goes to botsitting, 36% to actually using the tool to produce work.
Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fall short: Workers report that more than a third of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial rework.
Paradoxically, as more workers hand over bigger parts of their jobs to AI, they are offloading personal judgment and responsibilities to the bots. The survey found 41% of workers say they sometimes deliver AI-generated work they couldn’t explain if asked.
The report highlighted an example of a junior software engineer, Robin, who pasted thousands of lines of AI-generated code before going to bed. But something in there was broken, which a senior engineer already behind on a deadline had to untangle, while Robin struggled to explain.
“I think what’s happening with a lot of these Gen AI tools right now is we’re essentially expecting individual contributors to act as managers,” Leonardi said. “They’re just managing these AI tools, AI agents, and we’re expecting that they’ll be able to produce way more, but we’re not taking into account all of the work that actually goes into managing.”
This problem isn’t likely to go away.
The strange legal saga that torpedoed Jeff Shell’s career at Paramount Skydance has ended with a whimper.
An attorney for Las Vegas gambler and self-styled “fixer” Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani has asked a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to dismiss the scorched-earth lawsuit he brought against Shell in March. Cipriani had been demanding $150 million for allegedly providing “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services, entirely without compensation” to Shell over 18 months.
Shell’s attorneys separately filed court documents to withdraw a counter-lawsuit against Cipriani.
The bitter feud captivated Hollywood earlier this year after Cipriani went public with his grievances against Shell, whom he met nearly two years ago through powerlawyer Patricia Glaser.
Glaser had arranged a meeting in August 2024 between Cipriani and Shell, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal. At the time, she and Shell suspected Cipriani was behind an online whisper campaign to spread rumors about Shell just as he was trying to mount a comeback at Paramount.
A year earlier, Shell had lost his job as NBCUniversal’s chief executive over an inappropriate relationship with an underling.
Cipriani claimed Shell turned to him for protection against potential bad publicity. In his lawsuit, Cipriani alleged that during months of on-again, off-again conversations, Shell dished sensitive information to him, including that Paramount was poised to strike a $7.7-billion deal to bring UFC fights to Paramount+.
Cipriani also alleged Shell had reneged on a promise to help him develop a show at Paramount as compensation for his occasional work.
Shell has long maintained that he never made such a promise. He contends Cipriani, a self-professed whistleblower who goes by the handle RobinHood702 (the Las Vegas area code), was trying to shake him down.
“I didn’t pay this guy a cent,” Shell said Thursday. “From the very beginning, I wasn’t going to pay him a cent.”
Earlier this spring, Paramount conducted an external review into Shell’s conduct and found no violation of securities laws.
Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani in Amazon Prime Video’s 2025 series, “Cocaine Quarterback.”
(Courtesy of Prime)
The nasty spat culminated in April when Shell agreed to resign as president of Paramount Skydance to concentrate on his legal headache.
At the time, Cipriani had widened his lawsuit to include Shell’s wife, Laura, and tech billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison runs Paramount. Cipriani named others, including the Ellisons’ investment partner, RedBird Capital Partners. Cipriani’s lawyer subpoenaed entertainment and sports executive Ari Emanuel to get testimony to advance the beef.
Shell and Paramount’s lawyers fought back, demanding sanctions be leveled against Cipriani for an alleged overreach.
On Tuesday, Cipriani’s attorney Steven J. Aaronoff filed a request for “a dismissal of the entire action, with prejudice, as to all parties and all causes of action … against all named Defendants, including Jeff Shell, Laura Shell, Paramount Skydance Corp., RedBird Capital Partners LLC, David Ellison and Lawrence J. Ellison.”
Cipriani and Aaronoff were not immediately available for comment.
On Thursday, Glaser declined to comment. The veteran litigator found herself in hot water after her efforts to broker a detente between Cipriani and Shell spectacularly backfired.
Staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.
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