Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and his first officer were in charge of an aircraft that was refusing to climb after their Boeing 787 took off at Ahmedabad airport in India.
Video of the take-off showed the airliner halting its climb and beginning to sink seconds after pulling away from runway 23. The pilots made a mayday call to controllers, alerting them to a distress situation, about 60 seconds after starting their take-off roll.
Pilots trying to understand the events that led the 787-8 series airliner to lose lift and struggle to stay airborne, before slamming into a building, considered a loss of engine thrust as a possible cause. They focused, however, more on an anomaly: the abnormal configuration of the wing flaps and landing gear. Some veteran pilots speculated that the take-off flaps had been retracted by mistake.
