Travel and aviation industry veteran, and former Jet Airways CEO Sanjiv Kapoor said that the speculation around the role of the pilots in the crash of Air India 171 flight from Ahmedabad to Gatwick is just that – speculation. Without any strong proof, many theories can be made, he said. It comes after a Wall Street Journal report stated that the Air India probe has now shifted its focus to the senior pilot.

“None of this speculation matters. What matters is what is on the CVR and FDR. Without knowing that fully, a thousand different seemingly plausible theories can be made. All it does is feed fear, anger, confusion, and doubt. Not helpful at all,” said Kapoor on social media, sharing a clip of an interview of aviation attorney at Motley Rice, Mary Schiavo.

In an interview to Mojo Story, Schiavo recalling previous crashes or landing issues, said that there is a lot of precedent to suspect the control systems. “So there is a lot of precedent for being suspicious about the computer control systems on the Dreamliner or any fly-by-wire modern aircraft because it’s a flying computer. There are millions of lines of code and until that is examined, it is impossible to blame the pilots,” she said.

Schiavo added that the barebones dialogue between the pilots – where one asked the other why he cut off the fuel, and the other responded that he hadn’t – is not enough to ascertain that the pilot deliberately cut off the fuel.

“The information we have is just tiny little snippets. There are experts whose job it is literally to listen for tiny inflections in the pilot’s voice, to listen for every click in the cockpit, to listen for everything that happens. And of course, in subsequent litigations, that actual recording, the voices are allowed to be played in a sealed courtroom, but those sounds on that cockpit are so important. So, just having one pilot allegedly say to the other, you know, why did you cut off and the other one say, ‘I didn’t’ that’s not nearly enough examination to say that the pilots did it,” said Schiavo.

She also said that she has worked on several cases where it has all gone wrong, or it is a mystery or a disaster and the pilots aren’t alive or allowed to defend themselves. Schiavo said that the pilots get blamed in about 75 per cent of the cases.

“The team I work with have been able to disprove that. I mean there are just many cases where the pilots are blamed and including – just remember they’re not blaming them for suicide they’re blaming them for murder. I mean this is a heinous accusation and there is just no evidence of that at this point,” she said.

The WSJ report stated that it was the first officer who asked the senior captain why he had cut the fuel. According to the report, the black-box recording of the dialogue between the two pilots indicates that the more-experienced captain remained calm while the first officer expressed surprise and then panicked.