Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Just moments after taking off on Thursday, an Air India flight bound for London from an airport in western India crashed with over two hundred passengers on board. The Boeing seven eighty seven Dreamliner jet crashed into a dining hall at a medical school while students were eating lunch. The cause is still unknown and officials are still assessing the extent of the casualties,
though there are reports of at least one survivor. It's the latest in a series of high profile commercial plane crashes and safety incidents that have put passengers on edge, and it's the first fatal crash to involve a Boeing seven eighty seven Dreamliner, putting Boeing's safety record back in
the spotlight. Benedicaml at its Bloomberg's aviation coverage, and he says the incident comes at a pivotal moment for Boeing, whose new CEO has been trying to regain the public trust after a series of safety incidents involving the company's planes.
All of these things he's done. Whether this will now get sabotaged by this accidents too soon to say A lot of that will ride on what conclusions we can draw from the accident.
I'm Sarah Holder and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show What we know so far about the Air India tragedy, What the Dreamliner crash means for Boeing and for the commercial aviation industry. So, Benedict, thank you so much for being here. What do we know about the Air India crash so far?
So this aircraft, which is a Boeing seven eight to seven Dreamline, it's a fairly advanced plane, almost twelve years old. This is a plane that crashed just after taking off in India. It was bound for London Gatwick Airport, was due to land that tonight. Had two hundred and forty two people on board, that is and crew two very experienced pilots, and footage that we've seen so far indicates that the plane was still in takeoff mode, very low off the ground, just sort of over a couple of
houses and then sort of started descending again. It almost looked as if it were landing. But then the next image you see on the footage is of a giant plume of smoke and essentially the plane going up in a huge ball of flames. All we know is that it doesn't look like it was sort of an external strike of some sort.
Well, what do we know about the extent of the casualties at this point in the day, both on the plane and on the ground.
The plane did crash into a very densely populated part of the city, and so you can expect fully fueled, fully loaded seven eight seven, which is a huge aircraft landing or crashing into a residential area that will lead to casualties on the ground as well. The first proper official figure that we got from authorities was that just over two hundred people and bodies have been retrieved from
the wreckage. Now, of those, we don't know how many were on the plane, how many might have been people on the ground, But obviously this is a huge number and you should expect that number to rise.
There's a lot we don't know about what actually caused this crash. But what do we know so far based on the data we got from the plane before it went down.
So we know that the plane was in takeoff mode and it had just started its ascent, so it was about six hundred feet in the air at that point. It's twin engine aircraft. We don't know whether the engines were fully functional, or whether one of the engines had failed, or maybe even both of the engines at that point of the departure. This is generally considered one of the riskier moments of an aircraft journey. It's the takeoff and
the landing part where most things can go wrong. The plane is fully loaded, the plane is fully fueled, it's very heavy. The airport from where it was taking off is known to how have a bit of a bird issue. There are large flocks of birds in the vicinity. Now this is pure speculation. We have absolutely no indication yet that birds strike, as it's called, was a cause here, But this is something that the authorities will be looking at. The footage does not seem to reveal an obvious engine fault.
Sometimes in the past, when you have seen engines failing, you see flames bursting out of the back or a plume of smoke coming out of the engine. That's not the case here. So we have what looks like a clean takeoff. It looks like the main flaps of the wings are not extended, so you have a clean aircraft. The other big thing that will help is the retrieval of what's called the black boxes. So those are the
data recorders that store the main flight parameters. Those are the recorders that store the cockpit conversations, and those usually give very good clues as to what might have happened. One final thing to add is there was a may day call from the cockpit shortly after takeoff. We don't know what it said, but clearly the pilot, who we know was very experienced, saw that something was dramatically wrong and that led to the may day call. All these
things will have to get read out. Typically these types of investigations can take days, if not months, for a proper readout and then a final report that can really take a long time.
It's a horrible tragedy. When is the last time an airplane crash of this scale happened?
You really have to look quite far back, and more than ten years. So there was the Malaysian Airlines aircraft MH seventeen that was shot down over Ukraine by suspected Russian missile that caused almost three hundred deaths, and then Air India has not had a tragedy of this scale all the way back to the mid nineteen eighties, and that really gives you an indication of how rare these
occurrences are. We have had an increase in air accidents in the last couple of months, and looking back into the last year, there has in a greater number of those. But overall, this remains a very safe mode of travel. But people, obviously, when they see this, they think that
this is something that is on the rise. There are more incidents, there are more accidents, but something of this scale with more than two hundred dead people with a modern, very well maintained aircraft with an experienced crew, that obviously is an anomaly. Typically, what happens in these scenarios is that the crash investigators take over. So you will have the local investigators leading the charge. You will have police, you will have the army, you will have a salvage mission.
First of all, all the focus and right now will be on can we find survivors and then can we retrieve parts of the wreckage that will help us solve what led to this. So the NTSB, which is the US investigating authority, they are dispatching a team there. The FAA they're doing the same. Boeing will surely have a team they will send over that. So this is very
much sort of a technical analysis this point. Erindia obviously will have the role, should we say, with the more humanitarian side of this, to really look after families who are now wondering might my relative on the plane have survived, and to people who have, you know, the sad assurance that people have not survived, to look after them. But really the focus right now is on search and rescue, retrieval and everything else follows.
After that, after the break Boeing's safety record and how the Dreamliner crash could add to growing passenger anxiety about airline safety. I'm sitting down with Bloomberg's Benedict Camel in the wake of the Air India tragedy. Benedict, let's talk about what all this means for Boeing, because it's just the latest in a string of safety issues on Boeing planes. One recent, much less serious issue I'm thinking of happened last year when the door of a Boeing plane headed
from Oregon to California came off mid flight. So many viral videos of that. Can you refresh us on Boeing's recent safety record.
Yes, and the safety record has obviously been problematic for Boeing. You reference this one example, and yes there were no fatalities in that incident, but it really sort of blew the cover, as it were, off the safety lapses at Boeing, at the manufacturing lapses, and it really led the public but also authorities to rethink a sort of Boeing safety standards and their manufacturing standards. So Boeing really slogged through
a very very difficult year after that. They had a cap of the number of aircraft that they can produce. The FAA said, you can make thirty eight seven three sevens at a maximum per month. No more than that. We want to make sure that you've got your sequencies in your factory set up. We don't want you to rush things. It cost Boing huge amounts of customer trust. It cost Boing both with the public but also with
aline customers. It costs them huge amounts of money They had to go to the market and raise and all of this happened after two fatal crashes towards the end of twenty eighteen one In twenty nineteen, so Boeing has had a sequence of events that really, as I said, shone the spotlight on the manufacturing, on the systems at Boeing that were really subpar. This event here involves a
different aircraft. The ones I just reference were all about the seven three seven as a sort of small Boeing that most of us go on for short hops from one city to the next. This is the seven eight seven Dreamliner that's usually used on long international routes. So this is the first time that Boeing or an airliner has lost a seven eight seven.
Yeah, tell me more about that aircraft that was involved in this crash, the Boeing seven eighty seven eight Dreamliner. What is its safety record? What do we know about that aircraft?
Well, this aircraft's safety record has lately been really stellar. It's a very popular aircraft for a number of reasons. It has a good size, so popular on long routes. More than one thousand units have been sold. It had a shaky start when it was introduced, or even before it was introduced in twenty eleven, because it really pushed the envelope on a lot of the technology. But once it was out it did mainly very well. It was briefly grounded because of some issues with batteries and the
fear of that they might catch fire. But once that issue was out of the way, this is an aircraft that has done very well. It's really sold in very large numbers, and it has a really good safety record and the fact that no seven eighty seven has ever been lost in an accent is testament to that. So it's a very important aircraft for Boeing. It makes a lot of cash for the company. The seven three seven Max took on sort of the image of a not
so trustworthy aircraft. That's not been the case with the seven eight seven that's still considered sort of gold standard in its class.
Well. A former Boeing worker, John Barnett, did raise concerns about the Dreamliner. What were those concerns?
He's not the only one. There have been a number of whistleblowers that have come out and have said the way that Boeing assembles this aircraft is subpar, that cutting corners, and that really the plane should be reviewed, that the FAA should take a much closer look. A lot of this goes back to sort of the interaction between the
authorities and Boeing. There was a sense that for too long the FAA let Boeing sort of self police itself and that they could really sort of look after their own processes at the factories and could sign off on them in some ways. And that really came to a halt last year with this blowout that we talked about, and where the FA really took a very hard look at its own role and its interaction with Boeing. Then put a lot more people on the ground at Boeing
really slowed things down. So whether this will reverse this trend, and whether you know the trust that Boeing has rebuilt in the last couple of months, because Bowing was really coming, as I said, out of this very difficult year and was only now sort of gaining traction again. The production numbers were going up, the cash was building up again. The new CEO, Kelly Ordberg, he was seen as a
steady hand. So if somehow this accident reveals and again this is pure speculation at this point, we don't know, and it's way too soon, but if somehow this were to reveal that something was wrong with a plane, that would obviously be a huge blow to Boeing.
Right well, Ortberg, as you said, was supposed to be this steady hand new CEO that came into the position just last year. What has he done to address these concerns.
Well, he's done a couple of things. One is sort of maybe these less visible sort of internal communication where he's told people it's fine to speak up if you see something that's not right in the company. There was a sense at Boeing that if you pointed out things that weren't running smoothly, you'd get penalized. So orbo came in and said, we need to slow things down, we need to get this right. I'd rather we build fewer planes or we build them properly. We need to rebuild
the trust of the public, of the customers. There was a sense that Boeing was too fixated on its financial performance and not really so much as engineering performance. He's tried to sort of regain Boeing's engineering mantra. So all of these things he's done. Whether this will now get sabotaged by this accident, it's too soon to say. A lot of that will ride on what conclusions we can draw from the accident.
Given this context, given the safety issues, the passenger concerns, and the company's recent efforts, could this crash mark a tipping point for the company.
It might and you're seeing it to some degree in the stock performance today, which is obviously that the shares are hugely under pressure, and so are the shares of General Electric, which makes the engines for this aircraft. So if indeed it were to transpire that Boeing cut corners here, that there was something wrong with the aircraft, there was some sort of a failure, should we say, in the design or in the way the plane was put together,
that would be a massive blow. But again we need to be extremely careful here not to jump to any conclusions, but this is obviously something that will be very much on Boeing's mind. On the other hand, this is one of two global aircraft manufacturers out there in the civil aviation space, the other one being a bus So a lot of people say, no matter what happens, Boeing's not going to disappear. Yes, they will maybe enter another crisis,
but they will find their way out. They still make products that people need and that people want, and there isn't a third player out that. There are really only two games in town. So whatever crisis they enter, it might be threatening and it might be sort of all consuming, but it's unlikely that it'll undo.
Boeing, and this speaks to this broader concern that I think passengers all over the world have been having that there have been more plane crashes recently. How is this all contributing to the sense that air travel is getting less safe? And is that feeling backed up in data and reality.
Well, an absolute terms, air travel remains the safest mode of transport. I mean people in the industry will tell you it's probably less safe across the street or take a bus than it is to border plane. Now, having said that, if you look at an event like today, obviously people start worrying and start wandering. It's a highly regulated industry. Most of the aircraft out there are very well maintained. There are fierce checks and balances. But at the same time, we have had a string of accidents
since the beginning of last year. We've spoken about the Boeing accident of that blowout, but there have been others.
The helicopter crash in Washington Decerse, the.
Helicopter crash in exactly that one, the mid air collision, and there have been others. The South Korean crash at the end of last year, there was a Delta plane that skidded off the runway and landed on its roof. Luckily no fatalities there, But all of that has sort of added to a sense that this is an industry coming out of an incredibly safe phase. So this is an industry that needs to face a new reality, which is yes, it's safe, but the public are having a
lot of questions about that. You know, is it still safe to travel? Is not just a plane but also the people on the ground that are guiding the aircraft. Is that entire system that we've long taken for granted, is that still sort of trustworthy? That's a question that we are getting a lot more these days.
Benedicte. I want to end on the human toll of this Air India crash that we're likely to see more clearly in the coming hours and the coming days. What kind of support have we seen today for the people who are most affected here, who are the victims and their families.
So we know that in Gatwick, for instance, which is the app World in London, they've set up a helpline and local support staff and obviously this is hugely tragic for people who have lost their loved ones, and there's very little fundamentally that you can do that. You know, the best you can do is try and inform people as much as you can. But this is a fast moving and very chaotic situation. You have this wreckage in the middle of a densely populated city, so this will
take time. But so far, what we've heard from the government, from the companies, from the regulators, from local authorities, from hospitals that everyone is rushing to this moment. I mean, part of the reason why this industry remains so safe is because conclusions are drawn from these accidents, as terrible as they are. But you know, authorities, investigators look at these accidents and they draw conclusions. They look at, Okay, what can we learn from them, What can we do differently?
What kind of safety measures can we introduce that are a direct line from this accident to future developments. And that's why over time it's gotten much safer to travel byplane. Obviously, that's no real consolation for the families of the victims who are on this plane today.
Benedic, thank you so much for joining us and giving us all that you know so far.
Thanks for having me on.
Follow the latest developments in the story on Bloomberg dot com. This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow