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Usually the gear is retracted almost immediately after takeoff, as it creates a huge amount of unnecessary drag if left out when not needed.

They’re also not saying it couldn’t have happened, are they? They’re waiting for investigators to gather all the facts before making any statements, just like they should.

Meanwhile, we here on the internet are just speculating based on the limited information available (basically just the video footage). Based on the current information we have, my opinion is that pilot error is the most likely cause.

You’re free to disagree about the likelihood of different scenarios, but right now we have no evidence that makes the theory of the pilots accidentally retracting the flaps instead of the gear impossible or “absurd.” It’s really counterproductive to start ruling out scenarios without concrete proof.

I don’t get what you mean by “and no one figured that out yet.” As you said yourself, no one knows what happened yet. Pretty much all we have at this point are the videos, and all we can confirm from them is a rough flight path of the plane and that the landing gear remained down after what appeared to be a normal takeoff. I haven’t seen any footage that clearly shows the state of the flaps with any certainty, but please correct me if I’ve missed something.

In my mind, that leaves us with three possible scenarios:

• Pilot error (retracting the flaps instead of the landing gear)
• Dual engine failure at the critical moment (there’s no evidence of this in the videos, but also nothing ruling it out)
• Something else (we don’t know what we don’t know)

From the two scenarios (pilot error, engine failure) that fit the flight path from the videos, the option one seems more plausible to me. But that’s just my armchair opinion, it doesn’t mean anything. All we can really do is wait for the investigation and the preliminary report.

According to type rated pilots the 787 doesn’t allow you to retract flaps immediately in critical flight after takeoff.

That’s interesting. Do you have the source for that? I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer with google

There are minimum airspeeds the aircraft must reach before the flaps can be safely retracted. I don’t know the exact numbers, but assuming a standard flaps 5 takeoff for B787, retraction to flaps 1 would occur around 1000 ft by earliest, that’s typically 20 to 30 seconds after the takeoff.

Are the 787’s controls arranged in such a way that you could accidentally retract the flaps instead of the landing gear?

Not in a sense that someone could just grab the wrong lever in the dark for example. The levers are in different parts of the cockpit and also shaped very differently. But we humans can do all kinds of weird mistakes that are hard to explain. Almost everyone has experienced this sometimes. Think something like searching for you phone while it’s in your hand. Afterwards it’s very hard to explain why would anyone do such a silly mistake but it still happened. This would be similar.

One theory circulating online is that the pilots may have accidentally retracted the flaps instead of the landing gear. Apparently that would result in kind of a flight path seen on the published videos.

While this cannot be confirmed or ruled out with the information we have, in my opinion the available videos seem to kinda support this theory. Initially the aircraft appears to take off and climb normally, but for some reason the gear is not being retracted when usually it would be retracted right after the takeoff.

Naturally the gear could be forgotten or left intentionally down if there were a dual engine failure right after takeoff, for example, but as the videos show no evidence of this, I’m more inclined to believe in simple pilot error.