How Air India flight 171 crashed and its fatal last moments
Just moments before a fatal Air India crash on June 12, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s fuel-control switches in the cockpit mysteriously moved from the “run” to the “cutoff” position, an early investigation into the disaster has revealed.
Flipping to cutoff almost immediately cuts the engines. The investigation’s report, issued by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) early on Saturday, found that both engines shut down within the space of one second, leading to immediate loss of altitude.The report does not conclude any reason for the switches moving or apportion blame for the crash of Air India’s Flight 171, which had been bound for London’s Gatwick Airport.
Rather, the new details emerging from the report, including voice recordings from the cockpit, appear to have compounded the mystery about what caused the crash.
This is what the report has found and what we know about the final minute before the plane crashed.
What happened on June 12?
At 13:38 [08:08 GMT] on the afternoon of June 12, the Dreamliner departed Ahmedabad for London Gatwick with 230 passengers, 10 cabin crew and 2 pilots on board.
Less than 40 seconds later, the aircraft lost both engines during its initial climb.
In the first such incident for a 787 Dreamliner, the plane crashed into the BJ Medical College hostel and adjoining structures in a densely populated suburb of the city, just under a nautical mile (equivalent to about 1.85km) from the runway.
The aircraft broke apart on impact, igniting a fire that destroyed parts of five buildings. All but one of the people on board the plane were killed. The sole survivor was Vishwaskumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national of Indian origin.What has the investigation revealed?
The AAIB, an office under India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation, is leading the probe into the world’s deadliest aviation accident in a decade. The probe is also joined by experts from Boeing and participants from the United States and United Kingdom.
