The videos are horrific.
An Air India plane—a Boeing 787 Dreamliner—with 241 passengers and crew on board takes off from Ahmedabad, India. You can immediately see that the pilot is struggling to get the plane into the sky. Its nose is pointed upward, but within 30 seconds, it starts to sink slowly until it is no longer in sight. The next thing you see is a giant fireball as the plane crashes into a medical-school cafeteria. The pilot’s last words, according to Indian aviation officials, were “Thrust not achieved. . . falling. . . Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”
The wreckage is just as horrific, with the tail of the plane sticking out of the building and pieces of airplane, luggage, and bodies strewn everywhere. One passenger survived, which seems miraculous. So far, search teams have found the bodies of 29 people who had been having lunch in the cafeteria, bringing the death toll to 270. It seems likely that the final count will be higher.
Immediately, the question became: Who was at fault? Was it pilot error? Or maybe Air India—a company that has been trying to reverse its reputation for “shoddy operations,” according to The New York Times—had failed to properly maintain the 11-year-old Dreamliner. But on social media and elsewhere, there was no doubt where the fault lay: with Boeing.