London bound Air India plane crashes on takeoff

A London-bound plane carrying 242 people has crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, western India

Flight AI171 was travelling from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick

Tracking website Flightradar24 says it received the last signal from the aircraft at 625 feet (190m) "just seconds after take off"

It appears to have crashed in a residential area, our South Asia correspondent reports

Air India flight 171, a Boeing 787-8 (also known as a Dreamliner), came down in the residential area of Meghani Nagar five minutes after taking off at 1.38pm local time, Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, the director general of the directorate of civil aviation, told the Associated Press.

According to reports in the Indian media, the plane crashed into a building used as accommodation by doctors working in local hospitals.

The plane issued a mayday call to air-traffic control after takeoff. According to the Flightradar24 website, signal was lost seconds after takeoff when the plane had reached a height of 625ft.

If the plane was taking off, then why was its landing gear down and no flaps deployed.

For 15 years now, engineers and quality control specialists have implored regulators, journalists and airlines to take a closer look at the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing’s first and only clean-sheet commercial airplane designed from scratch since the company’s horrific 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. The smooth surface of the lightweight composite fibers used to construct the airframe can conceal deadly structural flaws, they warned. The non-union workforce that manufactures the jets in South Carolina is unqualified to stand up to “good old boy” bosses constantly pressuring them to ignore obvious nonconformities, install malfunctioning parts and cut every corner imaginable to get planes out the door, they asserted. Unsavory subcontractors have exploited Boeing’s lax standards to litter the assembly line with fake parts, they demonstrated

The late John Barnett, who died last March in an apparent suicide two days into a three-day deposition stemming from the insane practices he witnessed and tried vainly to stop as a quality manager at the Dreamliner’s final assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina, had a ready answer for this question: Just wait a bit. Most planes aren’t designed to dive nosefirst into the ground like the 737 Max. It generally takes, he’d say with audible sadness, ten or twelve years for assembly-line sloppiness to culminate in a plane crash. (Barnett personally drove everywhere in the orange truck in which he died.)

since the company’s horrific 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.