Air India crash fuel switches turned off

[limetrees32]

I've not found a thread on this , although it's taken me so long to search out the knowledgeable posters
on the Washington crash that there probably is one now.
But @notimagain what do you think ?

We cant assume, even if the poster has a male username?

Oh grow up. Some men do use this site.

Its not all a gender war.

I am well aware that there are male and female pilots.

The airline is liable to all passengers up to about USD 200k regardless of accident cause. Above that they can disclaim liability if they can prove they were not negligent, which they would not of course be able to do if it was a deliberate pilot act.

Meanwhile, back to the topic…

@HotCrossBunplease I don’t quite follow this. Do you mean that Air India would be negligent if it was a deliberate pilot act?

I wouldn’t have thought this would be the case, unless Air India had eg not kept to a recommended pattern of pilot health checks.

Yeah I maybe glossed over too much detail there.

The wording of the Montreal Convention is that to cap its liability at about USD 200k the carrier [i.e. the airline] has to prove that the deaths were “not due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of the carrier, its servants or agents.”

I mentioned negligence because most of the time there is clearly no deliberate act so the arguments focus on determining the dividing line between negligent and not negligent. For example, a Court in Canada recently held that Ukrainian Airlines was negligent in relation to flight planning when its aircraft was shot down over Iran in 2020.

Where you have a wrongful act you don’t even have to think about the negligence bit.

Got it, thank you.

ETA isn't "servants" an unusual word in the context?? I assume it means employees in practice!

I guess I’m just used to it. It’s quite common in legal language, includes employees but could go wider. International treaties in particular can have some quite strange-sounding terms in them as they are not rooted in any one single legal system and it all gets interesting when courts disagree about what the drafting committee actually meant. You’d be amazed how much court time all over the world has been devoted for many decades to defining what “accident” means.

I am male. When I first joined Mumsnet, about 15 years ago, I had a general-neutral username. I realised some people might be assuming I was female, so I changed my username to "CanadianJohn". BTW, I live in Canada.

"Three passengers who sued Alaska Airlines and Boeing after a door plug fell out of their plane at 16,000 feet have settled out of court.
These passengers were on board Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland to Ontario, California on January 5, 2024, when a door plug suddenly flew off the Boeing 737 Max jet mid-air. They sued Alaska Airlines and Boeing for $1 billion last year but settled out of court earlier this month, according to KPTV."

And this is without a single death. In the AI case, if Pilot error is found, who and how much can the lawsuits be? And if Aircraft manufacturing error is found, how much can the lawsuits be?

I even remember the Libyan bombing on PanAm, the Americans kept going after Libya for decades?

And a cut & paste from Telegraph -

Just hours before take-off, a pilot flying the same aircraft from Delhi to Ahmedabad noted in the technical log a “stabiliser position transducer defect”, the newspaper said.

The stabiliser position transducer is a sensor that controls the up and down movement of the aircraft’s nose, and transmits the data to flight control systems. The official said the malfunction was checked and the engineer did the troubleshooting.

“The malfunction is a critical issue as it can trigger incorrect responses in flight control, including unintended fuel cut-off signal,” the official was quoted as saying.

For the Pilot Suicide Theory which has just taken shape in the Wall Street Journal, the emphasis is that the Captain who was not flying was "calm" while answering "I didn't", there is a way to look at this - A person with experience should stay calm in such emergencies. Rather than "He did it, as he was calm".

My uncle lost 3 friends on this flight. And I frequent the BOM LHR route on AI. So I take a little more interest than usual. Everytime I travel the route, the plane seems like a Grand Bazaar and I go with the flow. But if lurking underneath there are structural issues in AI then these need rectified. Their non Indian CEO is a start. For people aware of Indian based airlines, they have non Indian CEOs, which no other sector in India has.

But the interim report doesn't clarify who said what @SuratNuJaman. Speculation shouldn't be done at this stage of the inquiry.

Still coming to terms with the fact that the crash happened less than a minute after take off.

The first 3 paragraphs of the Wall Street Journal article which appeared a few hours ago-

New details in the probe of last month’s Air India crash are shifting the focus to the senior pilot in the cockpit.

A black-box recording of dialogue between the flight’s two pilots indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane’s two engines, according to people familiar with U.S. officials’ early assessment of evidence uncovered in the crash investigation.

The first officer who was flying the Boeing 787 Dreamliner asked the more-experienced captain why he moved the switches to the “cutoff” position after it climbed off the runway, these people said. The first officer expressed surprise and then panicked, these people said, while the captain seemed to remain calm.

For those interested, this diagram is in the WSJ article.

Image attached now.

@SuratNuJaman

Re the stab trim maintenance message reported on the previous sector and this reported comment:

“The malfunction is a critical issue as it can trigger incorrect responses in flight control, including unintended fuel cut-off signal,” the official was quoted as saying.

I know where that idea has come from but the above is either a bad translation or the official has worded it very badly and may give people the completely wrong idea..

So in general terms what do you think they are suggesting?

The diagram looks in line with how the operation of the fuel cutoff switch has been described upthread.

@SuratNuJaman I totally understand that you would want a clearer picture on this, heartbreaking for your family x. Sometimes MSM exploits those who are in deep mourning. Even so called respectable journals.

Yep, that's exactly how they work, that's no great mystery..

To move to "cutoff" pull the knob out (against the spring) then move the knob down, and allow it to go into the cutoff gate.

..

Very much like reverse in some manual cars.

The switch off, the noticing and the attempt to reverse, that did happen but tragically too late, all within seconds of take off. May those who died rest in peace. Care too to the surviving passenger.

It's now been confirmed that it was the Captain who flicked the switches off. It couldn't possibly have been accidental because there was a second between each being deployed. Experts are looking into his mental health, who knows maybe he didn't want to retire and look after his dad? I had awful mental health problems when my dad lived with me for three years before he died. But I didn't have to retire from a career I loved to do it. Maybe he wanted to die doing the thing he loved most. The best YouTube pilot IMO is Captain Steeve. He's been flying Boeings for donkeys years. He has all but said that the Captain must have flicked off the switches because any other scenario just doesn't fit the evidence they have retrieved.

It's now been confirmed that it was the Captain who flicked the switches off.

Who has confirmed this, please?

The black box data confirmed that it was the Captain.

It's been on the news. The black box data confirmed it.

The "black box" (the flight data recorder or FDR) simply doesn't record that level of detail - it only records switch position and also the position/ settings if any systems it controls..e.g.valves in the fuel lines to the engines.

The FDR can't tell who (if anybody) put their hands on these two switches.

From the Standard, which is referencing the WSJ:

Until now, it had not been clear which pilot said what. However, US sources who reviewed the audio told the Wall Street Journal that it was the captain who was being questioned.

The standard is, I think, referring to the voice recording as black box data. The US sources may be right about who said what, but as we touched on above, one pilot might have moved the switches and then asked the other if he did it.

So I don’t think this “confirms” who did it.