I may have included some of what follows in a previous blog – it’s so hard to remember when you prioritise quantity over quality and end up abandoning as many of them as you publish – but I vividly recall waking up in Canada on the morning of 12th June 2025 and seeing a message from my partner. It went: “What type of plane did you fly on?” An odd question, I felt. “It was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner!” I replied. I then took my first look at the morning news to discover that an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner had crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick. Ah, so that’s why she wanted to know.
My first thought was not, “that could have been me” because I know that modern aircraft don’t just fall out of the sky for no reason. And just because an Air India 787 had crashed not long after my Air Canada 787 had flown me from London Heathrow to Montreal did not necessarily mean there was anything inherently wrong with this type of plane. But I was nonetheless, as a moderately sad aircraft spotter, keen to learn about what had led to the disaster which killed 229 passengers and crew.
The TV coverage on CBC was no different from that which I would expect at home. On-the-spot reporters, interviews with experts who had no more idea about what had happened than me and, distressingly. footage of the plane taking off, losing height and then smashing into the ground. Like the 9/11 murders from 2001, footage was shown on what appeared a loop. It is, I admit, hypnotic viewing until you regain the presence of mind to remember that you are watching an event in which 229 people are killed and you know many of their families and friends will have seen the footage, too.
The initial report did not come to a conclusion as to why the plane crashed. That will come later. But what we do know is that as the plane took off, the fuel lines to the engines were cut off, causing them to lose power and causing the plane to sink, irrecoverably back to earth. So we now wait until the full report is completed, likely some time next year. Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a programme called ‘Air India Crash: What went wrong?’ Would we now have answers to the big questions? I watched in order to find out.
Beautifully narrated by the actor and comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar, the programme started with stock footage of the plane taking off and then sinking back to earth before exploding into flames, killing almost everyone on board. Then the questions started: was it caused by this or was it caused by that? More footage was shown of the plane crashing, over and over again, I’m afraid and it quickly became clear that there were plenty of questions and no answers. There were the usual ‘expert’ theories but we were deep in the world of hypothesis. Cue more repeat showings of the plane crashing and that was basically it. A whole hour, which I watched with morbid fascination, ending with no conclusion at all. A few more angles of the plane exploding into flames, killing 229 people, and before we knew it, the end titles were coming up.
After the show had ended, I paused to think about what I had watched and I realised it wasn’t very much. Interviews with bereaved relatives, footage of the one man who survived (this was described as a ‘miracle’ by some talking heads, a miracle denied to the 229 victims who died instantly as the plane returned to terra firma), various experts, concerns about the Boeing airline group given there have been precisely no similar incidents with other Dreamliners and, I am afraid to say, plenty of padding. It was almost as if the videos of the plane crashing were on repeat to drag the programme out to an hour. In terms of good taste, I can think of no other reason.
The show should really have been called: ‘Air India Crash: What went wrong? We have no idea.’ But that was never going to happen otherwise mug punters like me were never going to take the bait, mug punters who have what may regarded as an unhealthy interest in aviation disasters after watching every episode of Air Crash Investigation, sometimes several times over. As Don Henley sang in his great song Dirty Laundry, it’s interesting when people die.
Next year, we will have another documentary to watch ‘Air India Crash: we know exactly what happened now’ and perhaps C4 should have waited it for the full facts to be revealed before broadcasting a programme containing almost none.
My educated guess is that the disaster happened because a human being fucked up. By saying that in the first place, C4 could have saved me wasting an hour of my life.
