The man who miraculously survived the AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad must be wondering what he had done to be saved by this act of God. Was it something that he did in his previous life, or was he saved for a duty he must perform in this one? The former reason is impossible to gauge but Vishwaskumar Ramesh certainly stands as the main counterpoint to the familiar narrative that usually follows any air crash: that the pilots erred, not their flying machine.

This time too, the initial hours after the crash saw the same pilot error story being peddled, especially by aviation experts abroad and in India. That the pilots were distracted and took catastrophically wrong decisions like retracting the flaps rather than the landing gear or shutting off a running engine rather than one that may have failed. That was accompanied by the mantra—shamefully echoed by many Indian media too—that the Boeing 787-9 is a really safe aircraft.

That Boeing’s formidable international PR machine could be behind this huge and touching faith in an aircraft is very probable. But what stood squarely in the way of that story taking wing is the testimony of the British-Indian national, Vishwaskumar, recorded by countless media channels. Now that the black boxes have been found their data may well corroborate that the pilots did their best. But will the big guns allow the “safest" aircraft line to be contradicted?

It is also providential that a local boy also filmed the plane going down, from an angle that was far closer than the two clips from the cameras at the airport. In his video, the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) can be seen deployed in the undercarriage, which means that the engines and/or power had........

© News18