Unexpected fuel cutoff preceded Air India plane crash, preliminary report says

Boston Globe

6 days ago

Audio from the cockpit suggests both pilots were confused over the change to the switch setting. 'In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff,' write the report's authors. 'The other pilot responded that he did not do so.'
Advertisement
The switches have safeguards designed to stop them from being inadvertently moved.
'Each switch has a mechanical lock where you have lift the switch up and then move it, so it's highly unlikely for switches like this to be inadvertently moved absent some mechanical failure,' said Jeff Guzzetti, the former director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Accident Investigation Division.
It is also unusual that both switches inadvertently moved to the cutoff position 'one right after another, one second apart,' Guzzetti added. Guzzetti did not rule out the possibility the switches may have been intentionally moved, citing the need to also investigate the pilots.
The preliminary report was released around 1 a.m. local time Saturday. The investigation is still in its early stages and is not likely to be completed for more than a year.
Advertisement
The Boeing 787 took off from Ahmedabad airport in western India before crashing down into a dormitory at a medical college, causing a massive fireball. All but one of the 242 people on the plane were killed, as were 19 people on the ground. One passenger made a miraculous escape from the doomed jet.
The airliner was bound for London's Gatwick Airport. The plane appeared to roll down the runway and take off normally, according to experts who have reviewed videos from the scene. But after just a few seconds in the air, the jet stopped climbing. The pilots transmitted a mayday call 23 seconds after the first switch flipped into the cutoff position, according to the report.
The plane's landing gear remained down and video and audio suggests an emergency device known as a ram air turbine, or RAT, had deployed on the plane, experts have said, potentially evidence of a rare double engine failure. The device drops from the bottom of an aircraft, spinning as it moves through the air to provide emergency power.
But in the weeks since the crash, it has remained unclear what might have ultimately caused the plane to crash. Aviation news site, The Air Current, reported this week that investigators were focusing on the movement of fuel switches on the flight deck, citing people familiar with the probe. The switches are typically used to control the flow of fuel when starting and stopping the engine, but they can also be used if an engine needs to be restarted in flight.
The findings issued Friday are required under international standards governing crash investigations. But they are a summary of facts available to investigators and do not include conclusions about why the crash happened. It is likely to take investigators a year or more to complete their work. The US National Transportation Safety Board is leading a team of Americans aiding the probe, but responsibility for releasing information remains with Indian officials.
Advertisement
The report's authors note that they make no recommendations to Boeing, the manufacturer of the plane, or General Electric, the maker of the engine.
Authorities typically provide regular briefings to the public immediately after serious crashes, but in the case of the Air India crash, little official information had been shared. That left a void filled in some cases by misinformation, and it stoked concern among international safety experts that the lack of transparency would make it difficult for other airlines to know whether any broader safety risks needed to be urgently addressed.
The investigation got off to a slow start. The plane's black boxes, which record conversations between the pilots and log data from the jet's systems, were recovered from the wreckage in the days after the crash, but investigators did not begin to analyze data from them until June 24 at a lab in Delhi. The information in the boxes will be vital to investigators as they piece together what went wrong.