Air India 171 investigation focused on fuel switches movement

theaircurrent.com

6 points·dondraper36··4 comments

The Air Current is very reputable, at least, so expect the preliminary report — if it’s got any technical details at all beyond a timeline of the flight and incident, which it may well not do — to mention movement of the fuel switches, even if there’s zero details about why they moved.

The crew at Mentour Now! did a pretty good job of explaining what these switches do and precisely how their operation would square with the videos of the incident, without straying into speculation or guesswork.

https://www.youtube.com/live/cQakAafxGck?feature=shared

Yeah, watched this today too. Kudos to them for the absence of guesswork.

That said, I believe that if the preliminary report shows that (1) there were no engine failures and (2) fuel switches were indeed set to cutoff, this has some crazy implications, as speculative as they are.

Officially, now, it was the switches being moved to CUTOFF. They were put back to RUN in 10 seconds, after RAT deployment, with engine 1 spooling back up to thrust just before impact. Switches survived the fire damage in that position, so the detents appear to have been fully functional. Crazy implications indeed. The CVR transcript isn’t in the preliminary report, but the little bit referenced indicates one pilot asking the other why they performed a cutoff followed by the other responding that they didn’t.

Disclaimer: This information is from a reputable source, but it is not yet official.

The preliminary report is expected tomorrow, but it will likely only outline the currently known information.

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