Expert Claims Pilot May Have Deliberately Crashed Air India Flight

New Delhi:

A leading aviation safety expert has suggested that the fatal crash of Air India Flight 171 may have been the result of deliberate human action, raising, for the first time, the possibility of a pilot-induced crash. Captain Mohan Ranganathan, one of India’s leading aviation experts, has pointed to the sequence of fuel cutoff switches and cockpit audio to suggest that the crash may have stemmed from deliberate actions taken in the cockpit, potentially even suicide.

When NDTV asked if one of the pilots intentionally switched off the fuel, fully aware that doing so could cause a crash, Captain Ranganathan said, “Absolutely.” 

It has to be manually done,” Captain Ranganathan told NDTV when asked if there is any way fuel can be shut off to the engines of the Dreamliner. “It cannot be done automatically or due to a power failure because the fuel selectors are not the sliding type. They are designed to stay in a slot, and you have to pull them out to move them up or down. So, the possibility of inadvertently moving them to the “off” position doesn’t arise. It’s definitely a case of deliberate manual selection to move it to ‘off’.”  

His remarks come just 24 hours after India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) published its preliminary findings into the June 12 crash, which killed 241 people onboard and 19 more on the ground. The crash marked the first fatal accident involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner since the aircraft entered commercial service in 2011.