That air crash in Ahmedabad

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The first hull loss of a Dreamliner happened two days ago, with one survivor walking away from the wreck and the canteen of a medical school hostel crushed beneath it. The Dreamliner was only in the air for thirty seconds, there's no sign birds hit it, but everything points to both engines having stopped after getting airborne. By which I mean it got off the runway at the right place with the right rate of ascent, it reached a maximum of just 650 feet without successfully retracting the wheels and from there drifted as gently as it could to the ground, engines apparently silent, external emergency generator deployed and a Mayday "no thrust, losing power, unable to lift" having been sent. It's hard to think of what might have made that happen, the electrics aren't meant to totally collapse and no other plane that day had issues with fuel contamination. One passenger flying just the previous leg was so bothered about the electrics that she tweeted about it, which is extreme - she said passengers were reduced to reading the flight magazine because the seat display screens were off, along with the air conditioning.

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I expect the black box readout will be close to announcement.

It got remarkably little distance. The take off appeared perfectly normal. If both engines lost all thrust just after the plane began its ascent, there's already enough kinetic energy to get it to the top of the climb that was achieved. In which case, since we don't like coincidences, the start of ascent or the start of lifting the landing gear is relevant to the loss of all electric power on the distribution systems - hence the deployed generator - and the immediate loss of fuel to the engines, and the incomplete stowing of the landing gear. None of those are trivial issues, they're the sort of events that redundancies are meant to prevent. And the mayday suggests the pilots had no indication of why it had happened, just what.