An Air-India airplane flies over Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on June 5, 2025. Photo / Getty Images
A Boeing 787 jet identical to the one that crashed in India made four emergency landings in less than a month earlier this year.
Some of the incidents involving the American Airlines plane were linked to issues with its wing flaps – vital control surfaces now under scrutiny following the Indian crash, after phone footage appeared to show they were not properly deployed.
Boeing shares were priced 8% lower before the opening bell in New York and were later down 5% as news of the tragedy, which killed 241 people on board the plane leaving a sole survivor, revived safety concerns about a company only just emerging from a crisis surrounding the 737 Max jet.
The American Airlines plane was initially forced to return to Amsterdam after a problem with its flaps was detected shortly after take-off for Philadelphia on January 7.
The aircraft dumped fuel over the North Sea before landing at Schiphol airport at a higher than normal speed, attributed to the flaps problem.
The flight was rescheduled, only to be cancelled after its crew discovered a hydraulics issue.
In the following weeks, the plane – which was eight years old and had completed more than 4000 flights – was forced to abort flights to Philadelphia from Dublin, Barcelona and Zurich.
Flaps affect an aircraft’s aerodynamics by changing the shape of the wing and play a crucial role in getting it airborne.
Yet based on some interpretations of footage of the Air India plane, they were fully retracted, a position in which they would have provided only minimal lift – raising questions around whether they had malfunctioned and were no longer responding to inputs from the cockpit.
The aircraft’s landing gear also remained deployed throughout the short flight, when on a 787 the wheels are normally withdrawn as soon as they leave the runway.
One possibility is that the landing gear became stuck and that the pilots responded by partially retracting the flaps to reduce drag and maintain the climb. If the adjustment was overdone, the plane would lose lift and begin to descend.
Questions had previously been raised about possible flaws in the construction of the 787.
Sam Salehpour, a Boeing engineer, came forward in 2021 with claims that the firm had cut corners on the Dreamliner, allowing “faulty engineering and faulty evaluation of the data” which meant that defective parts had potentially been installed in some planes.
Salehpour claimed to have noticed issues with the filling in of gaps between fuselage segments, known as shimming, which he said could cause fatigue cracks over repeated flights.
John Barnett, another whistleblower, alleged that Boeing repeatedly falsified or ignored vital quality checks at a plant in North Carolina where some of its 787s are assembled.
Barnett – a quality inspector who was later found dead aged 62 – also warned of problems with emergency oxygen systems and his discovery of metal shavings that he said posed a risk of shorting to electrical systems.
However, the plane involved in Thursday’s crash was built in Seattle and dated to 2013, predating any of the claims regarding lax production methods.
No 787s have previously been involved in a fatal accident before, though the model suffered a spate of fires involving its lithium-ion batteries in its first few years of production.
Thursday’s crash in Ahmedabad comes six years after the loss of two smaller 737 Max planes claimed 346 lives and plunged Boeing into a near-existential crisis.
The Max, Boeing’s top seller, was grounded around the world for more than 18 months after investigators found that the crashes in 2018 and 2019 had been caused by software meant to improve the aircraft’s handling.
Instead, the system effectively wrested control from the planes’ pilots, who were unaware of how it worked and how it might be overridden.
The Air India tragedy also came days before the start of the Paris Air Show, at which Boeing executives had been expected to declare that the firm was ready to bounce back from a more recent crisis involving the 737.
That meltdown saw a panel blow out from an Alaska Airlines plane as it climbed to 16,000 feet. Subsequent investigations linked the incident to a litany of production glitches and quality control issues at Boeing and supplier Spirit Aerosystems.
The Max was once again grounded and, though it was allowed to return to service, a cap was imposed on build rates, reducing deliveries to airlines around the world to a trickle.