Air India boss claps back at speculation the plane crash was caused by engine failure

There has been a lot of speculation over what may have caused the Air India crash which killed more than 270 people last week, and a boss of the airline has now clapped back at people saying it was engine failure.

Flight 217 took off from the city of Ahmedabad as normal on Thursday (12th June) and was due to land at London Gatwick that evening, but crashed into an accommodation for medical students shortly after takeoff.

N Chandrasekaran told Indian news channel Times Now both of the engines on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had “clean histories,” with one of them being replaced very recently in March 2025 and the other being serviced in 2023.

“The right engine was a new engine put in March 2025. The left engine was last serviced in 2023 and due for its next maintenance check in December 2025,” he said.

“There are a lot of speculations and a lot of theories. But the fact that I know so far is this particular aircraft, this specific tail, AI171, has a clean history.”

Credit: Photo by Basit Zargar/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

“I am told by all the experts that the black box and recorders will definitely tell the story. So, we just have to wait for that,” he added.

It comes after experts began speculating that the most probable cause of the deadly crash was extremely rare double engine failure, although this hasn’t been confirmed. Two black boxes were recovered which contain the flight data, and investigators are currently analysing this data to find out what happened.

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“The [recovery of the black box] marks an important step forward in the investigation and will significantly aid the inquiry,” Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) told the BBC.

One of the black boxes records flight data like altitude and speed, while the other records sound from the cockpit, so investigators will use a combination of both to determine what caused the plane to crash.