The final words shared by the pilots of the Air India crash, which tragically claimed the lives of 241 passengers, have been revealed alongside fresh forensic details.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed mere minutes after it had taken off from Ahmedabad airport on June 12, plummeting into a residential area, called Meghani Nagar, while claiming 19 more lives of those on the ground.
Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) have released the first forensic details into the tragedy which could reveal the cause of what is said to be one of the worst tragedy’s in india’s aviation history.
Among the fresh information, is the final conversation between the doomed aircraft’s pilots, captured using the cockpit voice recording, suggesting the fuel had been ‘cut off’ in their final moments.
Amid the perplexity, one can be heard asking the other why ‘did you cut off’ the fuel supply, while the other responded he ‘didn’t’, according to a report by Indian authorities.
It did not identify which remarks were made by the flight’s captain Sumeet Sabharwal and which by the co-pilot, Clive Kunder, nor which pilot immediately transmitted the distress call: ‘Thrust not achieved… falling… Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is thought to have lost power when the fuel cutoff switches almost simultaneously flipped, starving the engines of fuel, according to the report by Indian accident investigators.
The pilots’ exchange prompts a key question over the crash – who could those fuel switches, which are designed to be ‘highly reliable’ and are constructed to stop unintentional activation, be accidentally flipped mid-flight?
Each lever has to be pulled upwards to be unlocked, before it can be flipped and they also have further protective guard brackets to safeguard against any bumps and nudges.
‘It would be almost impossible to pull both switches with a single movement of one hand, and this makes accidental deployment unlikely,’ a Canada-based air accidents investigator told the BBC.
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