YouTuber Gaurav Taneja, who has appeared on television shows such as Shark Tank India and has accumulated around 10 million subscribers online, used to work as a commercial pilot for a decade. He has offered his commentary on the recent Air India Flight 171 crash in Ahmedabad, which claimed the lives of 270 people. Hours after the crash, he suggested that it could’ve been caused by a rare ‘dual engine failure’. He has since amended his theories to include human error, while also making a point to question systemic issues in the airline industry. He said that the easiest thing to do is to blame the pilots, but that a serious investigation needs to be conducted into some of the more questionable aspects of the industry.
In an interview on the Prakhar Ke Pravachan YouTube channel, he also questioned the mass-construction around Indian airports, and said that a major tragedy is waiting to happen in cities like Mumbai, where huge populations reside mere metres from the airport perimeter. During the interview, he said that the doomed aircraft could’ve been saved if the pilots had open space to conduct an emergency landing. Describing the probability of a dual engine failure as ‘one in a trillion’, he said that he has no recollection of anything like this ever happening in the past.
Addressing the issue of construction around airports, he said that loss of life could’ve been avoided had there even been trees and farmland. “A lawyer who is handling my case also, he has filed a lot of PILs. He says that there are a lot of buildings which should not be there. The Airports Authority of India has given permissions left, right, and centre. Land is expensive in Mumbai, and nobody wants to waste empty land. You won’t see this in any other country, that there are buildings immediately after the perimeter wall. But nobody wants to pick fights with builders.”
Speaking about the Ahmedabad crash, he said, “Even if there were no buildings, and there was some sort of jungle, the trees would’ve absorbed the impact. The aircraft would’ve been damaged, there would have been damage to the landing gear and the wings, but there would’ve been less loss of life. There is a procedure for crash landings. We practice it.” He said that most pilots anyway plot emergency landings during flights. “If you’re flying for 10 hours, what else do you do? You look at your map and you look outside, and calculate how long it would take you to reach the nearest airport in case an engine fails,” he said.
He said that the only conclusion he can come to is that one engine failed on the runway, after the point of no return, and that the second engine was erroneously switched off by the pilots, because of the first engine’s unexpected failure and the longer-than-usual liftoff distracted them. Reminding people that pilot error is caused by a variety of behind-the-scenes factors, he said that Indian airlines have a history of cutting corners. “These are such beautiful machines, they don’t fail just like that. They must’ve been taken advantage of. There must’ve been a human factor, things must’ve gone wrong at the airport, there must’ve been a long history of scheduling and management issues. A lot of things must’ve gone wrong for something like this to happen,” he said.
