NEW DELHI:
Fuel control switches to the engines of an Air India flight that crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 260 people, were moved from the “run” to the “cutoff” position moments before impact, a preliminary investigation report said on Saturday.
The report, issued by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), did not offer any conclusions or apportion blame for the June 12 disaster, but indicated that one pilot asked the other why he cut off fuel, and the second pilot responded that he had not.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner was headed from Ahmedabad in western India to London when it crashed, killing all but one of the 242 people on board as well as 19 people on the ground.
In its 15-page report, the investigation bureau said that once the aircraft achieved its top recorded speed, “the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec”.
“In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so,” it said.
The aircraft quickly began to lose altitude.
The switches then returned to the “RUN” position and the engines appeared to be gathering power, but “one of the pilots transmitted ‘MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY'”, the report said.
Air traffic controllers asked the pilots what was wrong, but then saw the plane crashing and called emergency personnel to the scene.
Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu told reporters that investigators probed in a “mature, transparent” way. “This is a preliminary report. We want the final report to come in, so let us wait for it,” he said.
Earlier this week, specialist website The Air Current, citing multiple sources familiar with the probe, reported it had “narrowed its focus to the movement of the engine fuel switches”, while noting that full analysis will “take months — if not longer”.
It added that “the focus of the investigators could change during that time”.
The Indian agency’s report said the US Federal Aviation Administration had issued an information bulletin in 2018 about “the potential disengagement of the fuel control switch locking feature”.
