AI 171 pilot 'intentionally shut fuel switches’: Italian report’s claim on final probe finding
Indian investigators are preparing to state in the final report that Air India Flight 171 crashed because one of the pilots turned off the aircraft's fuel switches in an "almost certainly" intentional act, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported on Wednesday, citing sources in western aviation agencies.
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The newspaper said a conclusion pointing to the captain marks a "desired turning point" for US experts assisting the investigation, after weeks of confrontations with their Indian counterparts who had refused to recognise a human role in the tragedy.
In December, Indian investigators from the AAIB travelled to Washington where they re-analysed the aircraft's black box data at National Transportation Safety Board laboratories, focusing particularly on cleaned-up cabin audio recordings, the sources told Corriere.
The audio analysis made clear which pilot took the fatal actions and ruled out the possibility of a mistake, according to the report.
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US experts conducting simulator tests of a Boeing 787 never found a scenario in which both engines shut down due to a failure, with human intervention — whether intentional or accidental — the only reasonable explanation, Corriere reported.
Western evaluations based on the flight data recorder pointed to Sabharwal, who was monitoring while first officer Clive Kunder was piloting, the newspaper said. The engines shut down in sequence — first the left engine, where the captain sits, then the right. In the final seconds, the first officer's control yoke was positioned to regain altitude while the captain's remained stationary, according to the report.
The preliminary report, released one month after the crash, established that the engines shut down almost simultaneously after fuel switches were moved from "run" to "cutoff". The cockpit voice recorder captured one pilot asking "Why did you turn off the engines?" with the other responding "It wasn't me", though the report did not identify which pilot said what.
The final conclusions will undergo a "political" evaluation, the sources told Corriere on condition of anonymity. The final document could adopt a more cautious version to avoid strong national controversies, the newspaper reported.
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