A cut in the fuel supply to the engines caused last month’s Air India crash that killed 260 people, a preliminary report has found.
The London-bound plane had barely left the runway at Ahmedabad airport when it hurtled back to earth. Everyone on board was killed, except for one passenger.
According to the report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, obtained by CNN, the fuel control switches in the cockpit of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had been flipped, starving the engines of fuel. The report does not say whether the control switches were flipped by a person or in another way.
Investigators were able to get data out of the plane’s “black box” recorders, including 49 hours of flight data and two hours of cockpit audio, including from the crash.
The aircraft had reached an airspeed of 180 knots when both engines’ fuel cutoff switches were “transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec,” according to the report.
“In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so,” the report reads.
Shortly after, the switches were reversed back to where they should have been, and the engines were in the process of powering back up when the crash happened.
On the 787, the fuel cutoff switches are between the two pilots’ seats, immediately behind the plane’s throttle levers. They are protected on the sides by a metal bar and have a locking mechanism designed to prevent accidental cutoff.
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