Was Ahmedabad plane crash a deliberate act? Report claims AI pilot intentionally turned fuel switch off

As the Indian investigators prepare to share the final report on the devastating Air India Flight 171 crash, reports are emerging that the authorities would conclude that the pilots "intentionally turned off" the aircraft's fuel switches. The revelation was first reported by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday, citing sources in western aviation agencies.

The report is expected to conclude that the pilots for the Boeing Dreamliner 787 intentionally turned off the fuel switches "almost certainly". As per the Italian news report, the latest findings are based on what the report said was a lack of technical defect being found, and analysis of cleaned-up cockpit voice recordings that investigators argued identified which pilot moved the switches.

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However, both the Indian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau and the civil aviation ministry are yet to respond to the report, which has been spreading like wildfire. The doomed Flight 171 of Air India crashed on June 12 last year, shortly after it took off from the Ahmedabad airport, killing 260 people.

The wait for the final reports

It remains unclear if the final report will include a detailed description of how the switches were intentionally turned off or explicitly attribute responsibility to a particular pilot. Currently, the main suspect of the incident is seen as the aircraft's commander, Sumeet Sabharwal, who died in the crash, Corriere reported.

However, the Indian pilots' association and Sabharwal’s family have slammed the way the investigation is going, insisting that the probe has been designed to pin the blame on the pilots for the tragedy. The family went on to urge the authorities to conduct more scrutiny on the aircraft maker, the airline and other factors.

The Italian newspaper reported that 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 it claimed had refused to recognise human error as the reason behind the tragedy.

In December last year, Indian investigators from 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 Western source, who asked to remain anonymous, maintained that the audio analysis made clear which pilot turned off the fuel switch and ruled out the possibility of a mistake.

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". However, the initial report did not identify who said what.