Re: Pure speculation
Possible hazards:
- there are generally a lot of birds around Indian cities, and fairly big ones too: think Indian Vultures, and Brown Kites which I'd guesstimate at about half the size and weight of Indian Vultures: very similar to the Red Kites that are now fairly common in the UK.
- however, Indian Vultures largely disappeared during the early '80s due to the introduction of a bovine medicine or ointment that was poisonous to vultures, so by 2010 or so vultures were pretty rare in Indian skies and brown kites became the common replacement in the scavenger food train.
- In any case, although ingesting a fully grown Indian Vulture would be about as lethal to a modern passenger jet engine (think of the jet that landed in the Hudson after meeting the flock of Canadian Geese), Brown Kites are a lot smaller and could quite possibly go through a large, modern jet engine without wrecking it.
- However, Brown Kites are quite chummy, and often fly round in gaggles. If there was a gaggle on the climb-out path it should have shown up in at least one of the videos of the crash, but there's no sign of that in any of the videos I've seen.
- Given that the flight path looks very stable and under control, except that it descends after a normal-looking, if relatively flat, takeoff and initial climb, my guess is that the problem is connected with the engines (and possibly fuel contamination) rather than with the rest of the aircraft or the aircrew.
I've driven extensively in India and still remember the low and variable quality of Indian petrol (easily the worst to be found East of the English Channel in 1977/78) as well as other industrial contamination disasters (Bhopal), so I won't be surprised if the crash turns out to fuel related.