Air India pilots’ final conversation before crash that killed 241 people revealed | News World

An Air India pilot denied switching the engines to chop off just seconds before the 787 crashed after takeoff, an investigation has found.

A preliminary report on the crash said that each engines lost fuel supply moments after the aircraft lifted off the bottom.

It also revealed that Air India engineers had attended to a fault on the plane just an hour before the flight’s scheduled departure from Ahmedabad airport in Gujarat.

All but one in all the 230 passengers on board the flight sure for London Gatwick were killed within the disaster, which also claimed the lives of 19 people on the bottom and injured an additional 67.

The pilots of the previous flight had flagged an error with the plane’s stabiliser sensor, which indicates the horizontal trim setting.

The report confirmed that Air India Flight 171 had reached a maximum airspeed of 180 knots when the fuel supply to each engines was cut off inside a second of one another.

Cutoff switches are often only deployed to power down engines after landing or within the event of an emergency within the air, resembling an engine fire.

CCTV footage from the airport showed the aircraft’s backup Ram Air Turbines (RAT) were activated after the engines cut out.

Evaluation of the cockpit voice recorder found that one in all the pilots asked his colleague why he had cutoff the engines, to which they responded they hadn’t.

Inside a minute of the engines switching to cutoff, the crew responded and put them back into ‘run’ mode in an try to restart them.

Nevertheless lower than ten seconds later one in all the pilots made a ‘mayday’ call to ATC.

A matter by the ATC operator in regards to the aircraft’s call sign went unanswered and the plane crashed just outside the airport’s boundary at a residential hostel.

The aircraft was airborne for a complete of 40 seconds before it smashed into the bottom.

Investigators from India’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau have focussed on the 787’s fuel control locking feature, which is imagined to prevent accidental deployment during flight.

The system, designed originally within the Nineteen Fifties, requires pilots to tug up the switch before with the ability to flip it.

A notice was issued by the US’s FAA in 2018 following reports that the feature was installed disengaged on some 737 aircraft.

Nevertheless Air India didn’t undertake the beneficial inspections as they weren’t mandatory, the Flight 171 report stated.

There had been no reports of defects on the fuel control switch within the accident aircraft since 2023.

Nevertheless an unnamed air accident investigator based in Canada suggested the simultaneous deployment of the switches made this crash particularly unusual.

They told the BBC: ‘It will be almost unattainable to tug each switches with a single movement of 1 hand, and this makes accidental deployment unlikely.’

Aviation expert Keith Tonkin said it was ‘inexplicable’ that a pilot would flip the switch just after take off.

He told ABC News Australia: ‘It’s essential to have fuel flowing to the engines, unless you switch them off within the event of an emergency where the procedure requires that. It will not normally be done and it’s a deliberate decision to try this.’

It was the primary major incident on a Boeing 787, which entered service in 2014.

The aircraft operating Flight 171, VT-ANB, was manufactured in 2013. Each of its engines had been replaced this 12 months – the left hand side in May, just weeks before the crash.

The investigation has up to now ruled out several possible aspects, including weather conditions, which were found to be normal in the course of the time of the flight.

The 787 was found to be inside acceptable weight limits and never carrying any dangerous goods, and each the pilot and first officer were each adequately rested and declared to suit to fly following a breath analyser test an hour before departure.

Get in contact with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

MORE: Air India plane crash investigation focuses on ‘mistake’ made by pilots

MORE: Japan Airlines Boeing 737 flight plummets 26,000 ft before emergency landing

MORE: Air India families ‘need answers’ with sabotage ‘not ruled out’