The preliminary report on the accident reveals that the fuel switches have been turned off and rekindled with an apparently voluntary gesture. 260 people died.
The fifteen pages with which AAIB investigators have framed in a preliminary way what happened on the fly Air India 171 on 12 June last, communicate some certainties. No incorrect configuration of the flaps, no problems of fuel contamination, incorrect balancing of the load or excess of the same, nothing anomalous to the engines until they have turned off and not even errors on the accounts relating to take -off speeds. Instead, the attention was paid to the position of the two switches that activate and deactivate the fuel system to power the engines, which would have been turned off and then rekindled. It cannot happen by chance: they are positioned right behind the handcuffs, in plain sight, and to be moved from one position to another they must first be pulled upwards. It is not new, the blockage is used to prevent accidental events and make the shutdown or ignition maneuver that normally takes place on the ground, but which in case of particular emergency situations can also take place in flight. Except that in this case, 260 deaths of which 241 were on board, a few seconds after take-off, both the switches of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuel have moved to the “Cut-Off” position, one after the other after a second distance, depriving the fuel engines and causing the total loss of power. And since the engines generate the push but also make the electricity generators work, here the logic of the evident on -board electronic has automatically extracted the emergency turbine (RAT) and rekindled the auxiliary unit of Potenza (Apu). There is more: the voice recording in the pilot cabin reports that one pilot asks the other to have “made the cut-off”, and receives a denial from the latter.
At that moment the co -pilot who was performing the take -off, as registration does not clarify who said what. At the time of take -off, the co -pilot was piloting the plane while the commander was depending on the control. At the moment it has not yet been clarified who asked and who acted, but we know that the switches in question have been reported in the normal flight position by activating the automatic reacing of the engines. Too late: at the time of the impact, an engine was starting to generate push while the other had rekindled but had not yet reached full power. Therefore the preliminary investigation, conducted by the Indian authorities with Boeing experts, General Electric, Air India, Indian regulatory bodies and participants from the United States and United Kingdom, raises several questions. Since there is no way to trigger those switches alone, who and with what intentions has he operated them? Was it an action dictated by confusion? Definitely unlikely, given that the pilots have not reported anything unusual. Of course, it would not be the first time that during an emergency the pilots press the wrong buttons, but here there was no indication of such a situation, nor any discussion among the crew members who suggested that the fuel switches had been selected by mistake. It therefore seems that someone in the piloting cabin has moved those two switches and then commanded the closure of the fuel valves. The question is therefore who and why. The vocal recorder will reveal more, but still takes time to identify the items. Certainly the presence of a video camera would without any doubt what happened to two pilots who had recently passed the training tests and medical tests, including the objection checks. Another direction of investigation concerns the architecture of the Dreamliner plant, to understand if the signal of the movement of the fuel switches may have been a failure of some kind and not the action of one of the two men at the commands. We know, however, that one of the two declared an emergency by broadcasting the message “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” via radio, but there was no time to listen to the response of the controllers. The commander of the plane Air India was Smet Sabharwal, 56 years old, with a total flight experience of 15,638 hours and, according to the Indian government, also an Air India instructor. His co -pilot was Clive Kunder, 32 years old, with a total experience of 3,403 hours. Two apparently normal lives that now become the subject of an investigation destined to last months before investigators publish the complete report. Then we will know with certainty what really happened.
