The Dreamliner Spiral

A modern aircraft does not plummet; rather, the story unravels, not with a single bang but through a cumulative betrayal—of sensors misfiring, software hesitating, human instinct deferred to automated logic. By the time wreckage litters a city, the chain of trust that holds man, machine and altitude together has already come undone.

On June 12, Air India Flight AI171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, took off from Ahmedabad bound for London Gatwick. Nine minutes later, it crashed in a fiery arc near the airport’s perimeter, killing 240 people onboard—one miraculously survived—and at least 38 on the ground. Preliminary flight tracking suggests the aircraft never climbed beyond 625 feet, barely twice the height of the Qutub Minar, before beginning a fatal descent, heavy as it was with fuel and passengers.

Three days later, another Dreamliner, Air India’s AI315 from Hong Kong to Delhi, turned back mid-air due to a “technical snag”. The airline issued a brief statement confirming the aircraft returned “as a precaution”. On the same day, British Airways flight BA35, also a Boeing 787-8, was forced to jettison fuel over the North Sea and return to Heathrow after the failure of one of its wing flaps—a vital high-lift control surface used during take-off and landing. And just a few hours later, Lufthansa’s LH752, a Dreamliner headed for Hyderabad, turned around following a bomb threat delivered anonymously. The threat was later deemed non-credible, but the timing, proximity, and aircraft model prompted a torrent of public speculation.

Individually, these incidents span a range of causes: mechanical, procedural, criminal. But taken together, they alter perception. The Dreamliner, the so-called poster child of 21st-century commercial aviation, is suddenly under scrutiny.

Boeing’s 787 series was launched with the ambition of transforming the widebody experience: quieter, lighter, more fuel-efficient, and more technologically integrated than any aircraft before it. It was the first commercial airliner to replace aluminium fuselage panels with carbon-fibre composites. It featured a revolutionary “bleedless” electrical system, which replaced traditional engine-powered pneumatic systems with fully electrical actuators, valves, and compressors. The aircraft computes its own pressurisation cycles, cabin humidity levels, even subtle trim corrections in flight, via software-defined redundancy. This digital ambition, however, has proven to be a double-edged sword.

From its earliest deliveries, the Dreamliner has faced technical hiccups that belied its branding. In 2013, a series of lithium-ion battery fires led to a temporary global grounding of the fleet. In 2021, Boeing halted deliveries due to quality-control issues related to fuselage shimming and improper joins. In 2023, new manufacturing audits were ordered following irregularities in inspection records at Boeing’s South Carolina facility. The aircraft was not, in other words, spotless.

The phrase “technical snag”, frequently cited in airline press releases, is a linguistic anaesthetic. It does not appear in any safety bulletin, nor in Boeing’s Airplane Maintenance Manual (AMM). Yet it is the term now widely applied to everything from a malfunctioning coffee maker to a hydraulic system fault. In the case of AI315, the aircraft reached 22,000 feet before returning to Hong Kong due to an unspecified “technical snag”, the term offering little clarity on whether the fault lay in avionics, flight control, or power systems. British Airways, to their credit, was more precise: BA35’s flap control issue was communicated as a possible actuator or signal pathway failure. Flaps are aerodynamic lifelines. Without their full deployment, an aircraft cannot safely slow down on landing without increasing runway length, angle of descent, or pilot workload. In some aircraft, asymmetric flap extension—when one wing deploys and the other doesn’t—can cause an uncontrollable roll. In the Dreamliner, such failures are rare but not impossible.

The Air India crash has already triggered multiple international investigations. Reports suggest that the aircraft’s Ram Air Turbine (RAT)—a last-resort, wind-driven power generator—was found deployed in the wreckage, indicating a near-total loss of electrical power from the main and auxiliary sources. This doesn’t necessarily mean both engines failed. It could point to a fault in power bus switching, transformer rectifier units, or even software-based errors in the aircraft’s flight control computers, say experts.

Investigators from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Boeing, and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will now pore over the aircraft’s Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR). Among the questions they will ask are: Were both engines spooling normally during takeoff? Was there evidence of flameout or rollback? Were flaps and slats deployed appropriately? Did the pilots receive or misinterpret configuration warnings? Was the autopilot engaged at any point?

One critical area of focus will be flight control redundancy logic—the rules by which control surfaces continue operating after partial failure. In deeply automated aircraft like the Dreamliner, where computers routinely override human inputs for stability and efficiency, a single misreading or timing delay can produce unintended consequences.

Passenger trust, fleet reliability, and Boeing’s long-term reputation in India, a crucial growth market, all hinge on what the data says next. The FAA has not grounded the aircraft. But several Dreamliners across airlines have been removed from active service pending internal checks, in what is certainly a reputational recalibration. Boeing called the Dreamliner “the airplane for the digital age”. It promised seamless coordination between systems, real-time diagnostics, lighter weight, and smarter flight. The irony is that it may now be undone by the same ethos it sought to perfect: the logic of digital interdependence. For now, the black box holds the answers, even as the Dreamliner, once aviation’s most confident silhouette in the sky, flies under a shadow of new doubt.

Ahmedabad crashAI171black boxBoeingDreamlinerengine failureflap failuretechnical snag