Early investigation into accident in Ahmedabad in June also contains details of pilots discussing the switches
Fuel to both engines of the Air India plane that crashed and killed 260 people last month appears to have been cut off seconds after the flight took off, a preliminary report has found.
Air India flight AI171, bound for London, crashed into a densely populated residential area in the Indian city of Ahmedabad on 12 June, killing all but one of the 242 people on board and 19 others on the ground. It was India’s deadliest air crash in almost three decades.
According to a preliminary report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, moments after take-off both the switches in the cockpit that controlled fuel going to the engines had been moved to the “cut-off” position. Moving the fuel switches almost immediately cuts the engine.
What the hell are these comments…?
Much better take on this, highlighting possible technical fault:
What killed them was poor crew resource management. Instead of quickly working the issues and increasing their survival chances, they chose to investigate and argue about who shut off the fuel.
Your argument: they did so little in those 5 seconds of descent before crashing. Shame.
Yes, the full 5 seconds could have been enough to increase their survival. Instead they spent some of that 5 seconds debating.
I would rather my pilot be an expert at keeping us alive, not being a master debater like you.
You know, I’ve noticed a lot more nonsense agreasion since Grok 4 came out.
It’s the crew’s fault since they didn’t react well with the 5 seconds they had. lol, jesus fucking christ
What killed them was poor crew resource management
Have you actually read the article?
What killed them was a deliberate action by one of the pilots. The motive we may never know, but it doesn’t look good either way.
in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB) highlighting that some Boeing 737 fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.
The probability of both failing would be the probability of one failing squared. I find this scenario to be far less plausible than someone toggling them, regardless of motive.
It’s Boeing though…
The far more plausible scenario is someone toggled them both, especially since there was a 1s delay. That’s not something jostling the plane or falling and hitting the switches.
That bulletin says they were potentially installed without the locking feature but to my knowledge these weren’t new switches on the AI flight, nor were there any issues reported on earlier flights.
Alright Bob send it!
Full power in 3,2,1! Go!
Oh, Bob, its not going!
Yeah I don’t understand…
Oh dude, that’s the new cut off that Bob designed!
Oh man, that’s embarrassing.
Don’t worry, it can happen to anyone flying this airplane.
OK, we’ll just turn these back on and hopefully next time we won’t accidentally turn them off again.
Sorry Bob, but that’s a single chance sort of mistak… Silence…Boeing’s Bob: so anyway, whereby gathered here to review this. DFMEA. The failure mode in question is the fuel cut off actuation at low altitude. The effect is lost aircraft.
Bob: you mean dead people?
Bob: OK we know where the aircraft is. Yes dead people. We’ll change the occurrence to 1 since we’ve had one occurrence. And the administrative control “training” was not effective with severity of 5 since the customers are pissed.
Bob: well they were pissed, some. Most were scared shitless don’t you think?
Bob: look Bob, we agreed on a scale of 1 thru 5. Maybe we should review the scale.
Bob: oh hey guys, sorry I’m late. Oh this design again. Yeah we should probably have some sort of inhibit so the shut off keeps the engines on if there’s not enough altitude.
Bob: yeah that’s a good idea. Let’s put that in the action items. Can you update the rail while I man the dfmea?
Bob: isn’t this technically an SFMEA? OK, I’ll start an ECR first thing Monday.
Dullness continues…
Meanwhile at some other random 787max3000…OK Bob, punch it!..
We’re giving it all she’s got in 3,2,1.
Dude! Didn’t you have the training?
Bob, what training? The fuel pump training Bob!
No, why.
That’s the fuel cut off switch Bob! What does it do if I flip it?
I don’t known! It just turns off the fuel I guess Okay where’s the max power button on this thing Bob?
Don’t know, I usually let Bob do it. Oh here it is!Bling bling!
Oh hey guys! I’m WFH today!
Sorry Bob, I forgot it was a teams meeting!
No worries Bob, you mind zooming in to a single screen?
Oh you’re seeing both of my screens in a tiny ass piece of your own screen with barely legible pixelated text that a fucking dumbass at Microsoft agreed to make into a default parameter for screen sharing during a meeting using a software they developed and functions poorly for anything?
Yes Bob, exactly. OK I can read the first 10 letters. You mind scrolling a few more letters slowly so I can read what the DFMEA is about?Its technically an SFMEA as Bob mentioned.
Oh, what’s an SFMEA? I’m only familiar with a DFMEA…
Oh an SFMEA is just like a DFMEA, but for safety.
Oooo! Okay. That’s exciting. Hey thanks for scrolling! Yeah this design again! I don’t known why they won’t approve my ECR so we can ECO a safety cover for the switch. You wouldn’t want someone to accidentally bump this thing while getting up from their seat. In retrospect its not a good idea to put it next to the knee rest.OK Bob, I got it in full screen, can you see more than 3 excel rows now?
Yup, its great! The new full screen which is actually just 75% of the screen is great for effective communication! But I wish Microsoft would give us larger squares with funny looking people icons. So important for communication to take up most of the screen with useless piece of shit dumbass icons and controls.
Agreed Bob!Meanwhile at another 787:
Hey Bob, I just put into full power but engine one turned off.
Dumbass! Didn’t you go to the online training?
What training?
The one about the cut off of switch! Turn that shit back on!!! Here’s the full power button!…folks, your captain speeching… We had some turbulence but we’ll be arriving at Laconia International airport in approximately 4 hrs. For now sit back and enjoy the ride!
Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner with General Electric engines
Yeah, what this is saying is that this crash is, so far, looking to be due to pilot error:
They turned off the fuel feed to the engines right after take off, didn’t realize they’d done this, didn’t correct it in time, and then the plane stalled out and crashed.
An analogy would be maybe… you’re driving a car, and trying to overtake someone on a highway, speed up and pass by them… and you don’t realize that you’ve accidentally shifted into neutral, so now as you try to merge back into the correct lane, you’re going way more slowly than you thought you were, and end up swerving into the car you were trying to pass, instead of ending up safely ahead of them.
Seems like it’s either deliberately negligent or sinister:
« The switches are equipped with safeguards, including a locking mechanism, to prevent accidental movement.
They are most often used to turn engines off once a plane has arrived at its airport gate and in certain emergency situations, such as an engine fire. The report does not indicate there was any emergency requiring an engine cutoff.
A US aviation safety expert, John Cox, told Reuters a pilot would not be able to accidentally move the fuel switches that feed the engines. “You can’t bump them and they move, »
« The switches flipped a second apart, the report said, roughly the time it would take to shift one and then the other, according to US aviation expert John Nance. He added that a pilot would normally never turn the switches off in flight, especially as the plane is starting to climb. »
The FAA in the US had found that in some planes these switches have been installed without the locking mechanism in place. So if that was the case here, accidental triggering of the switches is potentially possible.
Yeah thats… kind of baffling.
I know that in these kinds of situations, it can come down to a combination of incompetence/being overworked, and also miscommunication or blind deference to a nonsensical command.
I am spitballing here, I don’t know the internal layout of an '87 nor its exact take off procedures…
Maybe one of them somehow thought they were raising the landing gear?
I can’t imagine it would be any kind of standard to like… significantly adjust flaps mere seconds after rotation…
The thing was flying (stalling) with its landing gear down the whole time, right? Never retracted up?
Is it not fairly routine to start retracting the gear soon after rotation?
…
I guess its also possible its some kind of intentional sabotage, but that would seem to either require a conspiracy or at least one of the pilots being suicidal?
Not impossible, but I am not aware of any evidence toward either of those.
The landing gear lever is located between the 2 primary flight displays while the fuel cutoff switches were directly below the throttle. They also look and operate in different ways. The only way I could see someone accidentally confusing the two is if the pilot flew other aircraft types where some function is located in the same place as the fuel cutoff switches.
Apparently the cockpit voice recording caught one pilot asking why they shut off the fuel and the other denying it. They were also turned back on right before the crash and were found in the on position, so it doesn’t appear one was trying to force it off or anything.
Apparently the cockpit voice recording caught one pilot asking why they shut off the fuel and the other denying it.
Welp.
So, yeah, sounds to me like astounding levels of incompetence from the idiot pilot.
Or someone was lying.
so it doesn’t appear one was trying to force it off or anything.
I don’t think it indicates that given how the flight was already doomed at that point. The damage was done.
It’s possible it was intentional, but unless it was a terror attack from the pilot it doesn’t make much sense. Since there was no manifesto or any statement I doubt that. Suicide is technically a possibility, but why take a plane full of people and some on the ground with you? I know some people lose empathy and reason when they get to that point, but it seems significantly more likely to me that the pilot was fatigued and just did the wrong thing, hanlon’s razor and all that. Mistakes are more common than you would think, they’re just not usually ‘cut off fuel to both engines right after takeoff’ bad.
A suicide like this has happened before. It even involved the fuel being shut off.
hanlon’s razor and all that
The fuel switches have been very carefully designed to take “stupidity” out of the equation.
It’s going to be hard to conclude for sure that this was suicide without some form of note or other evidence we don’t have yet, but really, at some point the effort it takes to come up with alternatives is going to start looking silly.
👏👏 absolute cinema
Your performance as “random commenter unable to read but pretends otherwise” is Oscar worthy.
Looking through their post history they are either non-native English speaker who is a bit of a polymath but without the actual math part or an LLM someone is having fun with reusing a prompt they devised or copied.
At least their language and tone are constant across posts, albeit a bit inscrutable. FWIW, I did get the dark humor in their/its post.
I am confused. Is he LLM? Is you LLM? Is everybody just a braindead human zombie that can be approximated by LLM?? Is internet dead even in Lemmy?
Yes, all internet dead. No escape from dead internet. I’m a bot. You’re a bot. We’re all bots here.
Everybody is dead Dave.
