Air India plane crashes: Airline finds 'no issues' with fuel switches on its other Boeing planes - after engine starved of power
Air India has said it found “no issues” with the fuel switches on its other Boeing planes after the fatal crash that killed 260 people last month.
It comes as a US report suggested investigators have turned their attention to the actions of the plane’s captain. A preliminary report into the incident, released last week, found that the switches that controlled fuel going into the engines had been turned off “one after another” just after the plane took off from Ahmedabad airport.
It meant the engines were starved of fuel, causing them to shut down. Moments afterwards, the London-bound plane lost altitude and crashed, killing 241 people on board and 19 people on the ground.
Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder found that the younger co-pilot asked the captain why he had turned off the plane’s fuel-supply switches, according to a US media report. It was he who asked flight captain Sumeet Sabharwal why he had flipped the switches, starving the engines of fuel.
The sources cited by the WSJ did not state if the action was believed to be deliberate or accidental. It was reported that US officials believed criminal investigators should also be involved in looking into the incident.
The fuel switches were moved back on seconds after, and one of the engines restarted, but it was not enough to reverse the plane’s deceleration. A “mayday, mayday, mayday” message was transmitted to air traffic control before the plane hit the ground, just 32 seconds after it had left the runway.
After the release of the report last week, India’s civil aviation minister, Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu, said people should not “jump to conclusions”, citing the welfare and wellbeing of India’s pilots. Two groups representing pilots condemned the suggestion that pilot error or action could be the cause of the crash as “reckless and unfounded insinuation”.
The preliminary report, by India’s aviation authority, made no recommendations for action against Boeing, which manufactures the 787 Dreamliner. However, after the report’s release, Air India ordered that the locking mechanisms of all fuel control switches – designed to prevent them from being accidentally turned off in-flight – on its Boeing planes be examined as a precautionary measure.