It’s an unequal battle. On one side stands aerospace giant Boeing, which has every incentive to avoid admitting even the smallest flaw in its Dreamliner aircraft. On the other are two dead men – the pilots of Air India Flight 171 – who are no longer able to defend themselves.
Weeks after the Boeing 787-8 crashed seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad airport, the questions are still piling up.
Despite a preliminary report from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Board (AIIB), one critical moment remains shrouded in mystery: why were both fuel switches turned off, almost simultaneously, as the plane reached takeoff speed?
In one crucial paragraph, the AIIB report states: “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.” Another report also now says that the pilot flying repeated his question – though this is not included in the Preliminary Report.
The report also notes: “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.”
It’s important to remember that the cutoff switches are manually operated and control the flow of fuel to the engines. Shutting them down mid-takeoff is catastrophic. So why were they turned off? And why did one pilot ask the other why he had done it?
Though the report doesn’t specify who asked the question, it was almost certainly co-pilot Clive Kunder – the Pilot Flying (PF) on the ill-fated flight. As PF, he would have had his hands full managing the takeoff, while Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the Pilot Monitoring (PM), would have been assisting with systems and protocols.
Could AI171’s electronic systems have failed? That’s always a possibility. But in that case, why did one pilot ask the other why he had cut the switches? The switches were turned off around 08:08:42, when the London-bound plane had just reached 207 miles per hour, the highest speed it records on its short flight. About 10 seconds later, the switches were turned back on. One engine reignited and began to recover. The other engine relighted but could not halt its “core speed deceleration.”
At 08:09:05, one of the pilots issued a Mayday call. The air traffic control officer (ATCO) inquired what had happened, but by then, the crash had already taken place. As the report notes: “The ATCO enquired about the call sign. ATCO did not get any response but observed the aircraft crashing outside the airport boundary and activated the emergency response.”
The crash killed 241 out of the 242 passengers and crew on board, along with 19 people on the ground. The AIIB has included only two sentences spoken by the pilots in its preliminary report. It offers no detailed reconstruction of the final seconds. It’s not clear why more of the cockpit conversation has not been released.
Some pilots have questioned whether it is physically possible to manually turn off both switches, which have a locking mechanism, within a second. Some say – it’s a simple action if done deliberately. Others find it hard to imagine both switches being manually flipped so quickly.
The Wall Street Journal, which has published several stories about the crash – one of them appearing three days before the preliminary report was released – has now pointed the finger firmly at the senior pilot.
It reports: “A black-box recording of the dialogue between the flight’s two pilots indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane’s two engines.” It cited “people familiar with US officials’ early assessment of evidence uncovered in the crash investigation.”
According to the WSJ, the first officer or PF asked why the captain had shut off the fuel supply. “The first officer expressed surprise and then panicked,” it writes. “The captain seemed to remain calm.”
It adds: “Details in the preliminary report also suggest it was the captain who turned off the switches.” However, it notes: “The report didn’t say whether turning off the switches might have been accidental or deliberate.”
Even so, the suggestion that the captain may have caused the crash, knowingly or unknowingly, has drawn criticism from Indian officials, who have said the public should wait for the final report on the disaster.
The WSJ acknowledged that the Civil Aviation Ministry and the AIIB have called its reporting one-sided. The AIIB has urged people to “refrain from premature narratives” while the Airline Pilots’ Association has denounced what it called the “unfounded insinuation of pilot suicide,” saying there was no basis for such a claim at this stage.
This isn’t the first time Boeing has faced serious questions about the safety of its aircraft. The 737 Max was grounded worldwide after two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, with initial blame placed on pilots before Boeing admitted to critical flaws in its software and paid huge settlements. The Dreamliner, the model involved in the AI171 crash, has had its own history of trouble from battery fires that grounded the fleet in 2013 to manufacturing defects in the fuselage and tail sections. Air India says all its Dreamliner aircraft, which are the backbone of its long-haul fleet, have been checked and are fit for service.
The WSJ said it spoke to people who knew Sabharwal. One friend, Kapil Kohal, an Air India pilot who trained with Sabharwal at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi, remarked: “He stood out” among his classmates. He was “very polite, never cursed, never drank alcohol, and spoke so softly” that Kohal said he sometimes had to ask him to speak louder.
On an unkinder note, the WSJ added: “Sabharwal’s serious demeanour, along with the way his eyes turned down at the corners, earned him the nickname ‘Sad Sack’.”
For good measure, it reported that: “Sabharwal kept a spartan room filled with the bare minimum. If you opened his cupboard, there were two formal shirts, two T-shirts, two pairs of shoes, one slippers, and one bag.”
It should be pointed out that Sabharwal’s father was a bureaucrat in the Civil Aviation Ministry. He could certainly have afforded more clothing had he wanted.
Sabharwal’s friend, Kohal, adds: “He was driven by a sheer love of flying.”
That raises a fundamental question: Would someone who loved to fly and who was a superb training pilot deliberately act against a lifetime of aviation instinct and calmly take down a plane he was entrusted with? Would he knowingly have taken a step that would result in the deaths of passengers whose safety he was morally and professionally bound to protect? These are questions that demand answers.
The preliminary report avoids delving into great detail or offering an opinion. The portions describing the flight itself span just parts of three pages. Perhaps that’s not surprising as the flight lasted only 38 seconds. But its brevity has left many analysts frustrated. More might have been learned had the report included a greater portion of the pilots’ exchange.
There are just two lines about what the pilots said. There’s also a sentence noting that the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) was deployed – a backup system that only activates when a plane’s engines fail. Had the engines cut out at a slightly higher altitude, the RAT might have kept the plane airborne long enough to allow the engines to restart. But that chance never came.
Until more is made public, particularly the full cockpit transcript and detailed systems analysis, the central question will persist: Why did both fuel switches get turned off at the worst possible moment? Was it human error? A system malfunction? A design flaw? Or something else, like sabotage, tampering or a chain of human and system failures?
On social media, a cynical quip has resurfaced: “If it’s Boeing, I ain’t going.” It captures an unease among the flying public, who want to know exactly what happened aboard flight AI171 __ and what safeguards are being put in place to prevent such a catastrophe from recurring.