It was the first officer who asked the senior captain if he had turned off the fuel switches, stated a report in Wall Street Journal that quoted people familiar with US officials’ early assessment of the Air India plane crash that led to the death of 241 people onboard as well as many on the ground.
According to the WSJ report, the black-box recording of the dialogue between the two pilots indicates that the more-experienced captain remained calm as he turned off the switches while the first officer expressed surprise and then panicked, asking his senior why he moved the switches from ‘run’ to ‘cutoff’ position.
Earlier, a preliminary probe by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) identified the dialogue between the pilots but did not clarify who said what. As per the AAIB report that had revealed the cockpit voice recordings, one pilot asked, “Why did you cut off?” while the other replied, “I didn’t.” The report didn’t specify if the turning of the switches was accidental or deliberate.
The switches were turned in succession one second apart as per the AAIB report.
However, a pilots’ group in India has raised concerns about biases against the pilots. The Airline Pilots’ Association of India (ALPA-India) questioned the lack of transparency in the investigation and raised concerns about the AAIB report’s bias towards pilot error. The group also said there was secrecy around the investigation. ALPA said that “suitably qualified personnel were not taken on board for these crucial investigations”. “We feel that the investigation is being driven in a direction presuming the guilt of pilots and we strongly object to this line of thought,” ALPA-India President Captain Sam Thomas had said.
It must be mentioned that the experienced Captain Sumeet Sabharwal had 8,200 hours of flight experience, while First Officer Clive Kundar had a flight experience of 1,100 hours.
Meanwhile, a report in The Indian Express throws light on another possible angle. Investigators are reportedly probing snags that cropped up in the electrical and software components of the aircraft, which could have possibly triggered “uncommanded” actions.
In fact, a pilot flying the same plane hours before the flight took off from Ahmedabad, had noted a ‘Stabilizer Position Transducer Defect’ in the technical log. The Stabilizer Position Transducer controls the up and down movement of the aircraft’s nose, and transmits the data in electrical signals to the flight control system.
An official told the daily that it is unlikely that the ‘Stabilizer Position Transducer Defect’ caused the crash but it could have led to multiple sensor failure.
The official said the flight data analysis would focus on the trail of errors noted in technical logs to ascertain the health of the electric and software components of the aircraft. According to him, the aircraft had previously experienced two major snags – one was a flight cancellation in December 2024 due to an unresolvable electric snag and the other an emergency landing in 2015 caused by a Cabin Air Compressor surge.
