Early investigation into accident in Ahmedabad in June also contains details of pilots discussing the switches
Fuel to both engines of the Air India plane that crashed and killed 260 people last month appears to have been cut off seconds after the flight took off, a preliminary report has found.
Air India flight AI171, bound for London, crashed into a densely populated residential area in the Indian city of Ahmedabad on 12 June, killing all but one of the 242 people on board and 19 others on the ground. It was India’s deadliest air crash in almost three decades.
According to a preliminary report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, moments after take-off both the switches in the cockpit that controlled fuel going to the engines had been moved to the “cut-off” position. Moving the fuel switches almost immediately cuts the engine.
Yeah, what this is saying is that this crash is, so far, looking to be due to pilot error:
They turned off the fuel feed to the engines right after take off, didn’t realize they’d done this, didn’t correct it in time, and then the plane stalled out and crashed.
An analogy would be maybe… you’re driving a car, and trying to overtake someone on a highway, speed up and pass by them… and you don’t realize that you’ve accidentally shifted into neutral, so now as you try to merge back into the correct lane, you’re going way more slowly than you thought you were, and end up swerving into the car you were trying to pass, instead of ending up safely ahead of them.
Seems like it’s either deliberately negligent or sinister:
« The switches are equipped with safeguards, including a locking mechanism, to prevent accidental movement.
They are most often used to turn engines off once a plane has arrived at its airport gate and in certain emergency situations, such as an engine fire. The report does not indicate there was any emergency requiring an engine cutoff.
A US aviation safety expert, John Cox, told Reuters a pilot would not be able to accidentally move the fuel switches that feed the engines. “You can’t bump them and they move, »
« The switches flipped a second apart, the report said, roughly the time it would take to shift one and then the other, according to US aviation expert John Nance. He added that a pilot would normally never turn the switches off in flight, especially as the plane is starting to climb. »
The FAA in the US had found that in some planes these switches have been installed without the locking mechanism in place. So if that was the case here, accidental triggering of the switches is potentially possible.
Yeah thats… kind of baffling.
I know that in these kinds of situations, it can come down to a combination of incompetence/being overworked, and also miscommunication or blind deference to a nonsensical command.
I am spitballing here, I don’t know the internal layout of an '87 nor its exact take off procedures…
Maybe one of them somehow thought they were raising the landing gear?
I can’t imagine it would be any kind of standard to like… significantly adjust flaps mere seconds after rotation…
The thing was flying (stalling) with its landing gear down the whole time, right? Never retracted up?
Is it not fairly routine to start retracting the gear soon after rotation?
…
I guess its also possible its some kind of intentional sabotage, but that would seem to either require a conspiracy or at least one of the pilots being suicidal?
Not impossible, but I am not aware of any evidence toward either of those.
The landing gear lever is located between the 2 primary flight displays while the fuel cutoff switches were directly below the throttle. They also look and operate in different ways. The only way I could see someone accidentally confusing the two is if the pilot flew other aircraft types where some function is located in the same place as the fuel cutoff switches.
Apparently the cockpit voice recording caught one pilot asking why they shut off the fuel and the other denying it. They were also turned back on right before the crash and were found in the on position, so it doesn’t appear one was trying to force it off or anything.
Welp.
So, yeah, sounds to me like astounding levels of incompetence from the idiot pilot.
Or someone was lying.
I don’t think it indicates that given how the flight was already doomed at that point. The damage was done.
It’s possible it was intentional, but unless it was a terror attack from the pilot it doesn’t make much sense. Since there was no manifesto or any statement I doubt that. Suicide is technically a possibility, but why take a plane full of people and some on the ground with you? I know some people lose empathy and reason when they get to that point, but it seems significantly more likely to me that the pilot was fatigued and just did the wrong thing, hanlon’s razor and all that. Mistakes are more common than you would think, they’re just not usually ‘cut off fuel to both engines right after takeoff’ bad.
A suicide like this has happened before. It even involved the fuel being shut off.
The fuel switches have been very carefully designed to take “stupidity” out of the equation.
It’s going to be hard to conclude for sure that this was suicide without some form of note or other evidence we don’t have yet, but really, at some point the effort it takes to come up with alternatives is going to start looking silly.
I think one of the biggest giveaways will be the voice recording and how they react to the situation. I doubt it will release publicly but it should give at least some idea to the Investigators.
And I was pretty surprised by the switches honestly, I figured they would have at least a guard and a spring loaded toggle, but it’s just the spring loaded toggle. Those are used a lot for any switch you don’t want moving accidentally, so it wasn’t super unique or anything.
They do have guards on the sides, so it’s not completely out in the open.
Hopefully politics won’t get involved in the final report like it did in the EgyptAir case.