The more technology on an airplane, the less likely an accident will remain a mystery. That is going to be the case for the Air India Flight 171, which crashed on June 12th, killing 230 on board the plane and at least 39 on the ground. A final tally of the dead has not been completed as of this writing.

The Boeing 787  Dreamliner plowed into a building half a minute after takeoff from Ahmedabad bound for London. Very quickly, a lot of information became available. There was a very good eyewitness video of nearly the entire flight from the takeoff roll to the crash. The plane’s sole survivor gave a good description of the short flight including the observation that the plane appeared to hang in the air and white and green lights came on in the cabin. Eyewitness accounts suggest that the Boeing 787 lost engine power just after becoming airborne.

The video, complete with audio of the plane as it passed close to the camera position, shows the ram air turbine (RAT) extended from behind the right wing. And the distinctive whir of the spinning propeller can be heard.

When the RAT is extended due to loss of the engines, it provides enough power to operate essential electric and hydraulic functions.

In the case of Flight 171, the pilots did not have sufficient time or altitude to handle the loss of both engines. The entire flight was approximately 35 seconds, and the maximum altitude achieved before hitting the building and exploding was slightly more than 600 feet.

The loss of multiple engines during takeoff is so exceedingly rare, I can find only a few cases on civilian jetliners.

US Airways Flight 1549, aka the Miracle on the Hudson hit birds on ascent out of LaGuardia in New York and landed successfully in the Hudson River in New York City in 2009 with no loss of life.

Qantas Flight 32, an Airbus A380 lost three of four engines four minutes after departing from Singapore’s Changi Airport in 2010 and was able to return to the airport after 90 minutes of troubleshooting by the five, count ’em 5, pilots in on the flight deck. (Read more about that here.)

Two others are worth noting, however.

While dissimilar in its state of flight, the near disaster of British Airways Flight 38 in 2008 was also critical in terms of timing. The flight from Beijing to London lost both engines at 400 feet on descent to London’s Heathrow Airport.  A rare condition in which ice clogged the fuel filters led to fuel starvation at a most critical time.

Pilots were able to respond and get the plane on the ground with no deaths. (Read more about this here.)

Most interesting in relation to the Air India crash, however, is a 2015 event in Sevilla in which an Airbus A400M, a four-engine turboprop military transport airplane, lost three of four engines on takeoff and crashed, killing four. Investigators concluded that a computer malfunction interfered with engine operation during takeoff.

The loss of more than one engine increases the likelihood that the problem is within the system rather than the engines. It could be in the fuel, or the fuel supply or the powerplant electronics. Interesting discussions on these possibilities populate some of the aviation forums.

What we don’t know is far more than what we do. It is reasonable to conclude that the clues already available and the enormous amount of data collected by the flight data recorder on the highly digitized 787, will yield confirmable facts about Flight 171. Everyone deserves that – the hundreds of people who lost loved ones last week and the millions of people who will be flying on the Dreamliner and Air India in the future.