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Air India 171 crash investigation: Update

Via the Oz:

New details in Air India crash probe shift focus to senior pilot



New details in the probe of last month’s Air India crash are shifting the focus to the senior pilot in the cockpit.

A black-box recording of dialogue between the flight’s two pilots indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane’s two engines, according to people familiar with US officials’ early assessment of evidence uncovered in the crash investigation.

The first officer who was flying the Boeing 787 Dreamliner asked the more-experienced captain why he moved the switches to the “cut-off” position after it climbed off the runway, the sources said. The first officer expressed surprise and then panicked, the sources said, while the captain seemed to remain calm.

A preliminary report of the probe released last week summarised the exchange but did not identify which pilot said what.

The report, by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, said one pilot asked the other why he moved the switches, while the other denied doing so.

Details in the preliminary report also suggest it was the captain who turned off the switches, according sources, US pilots and safety experts tracking the probe.

The report did not say whether turning off the switches might have been accidental or deliberate.



The new details could add to understanding the sequence of events that led to the June 12 tragedy, and the actions of the pilots, both of whom grew up with dreams of flying.

The captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, was a decades-long veteran, while the first officer, Clive Kunder, was in his early 30s and eager for the next stage of his career, friends and family members said.

As the pilot actively flying, Kunder likely would have had his hands full pulling back on the Dreamliner’s controls at that stage of the flight, say US pilots who have read the Indian authorities’ report.

Sabharwal, as the pilot monitoring, would have been more likely to have had his hands free as he oversaw the operation.

The switches were moved in succession, one second apart, according to the report. About 10 seconds later, both switches were turned back on. The plane crashed near the Ahmedabad airport, killing all but one of the 242 on board.

The preliminary details have fuelled the belief among some US officials that criminal authorities should review the matter, as would likely be the case if the crash had occurred on American soil, sources said.

In the US, accident investigators historically have involved agencies such as the FBI if they believe a potential crime occurred, rather than a safety mishap.

The Indian authorities’ preliminary report did not reach any conclusions about what led to the crash, or why the fuel switches were turned off.

The report did not rule out possible design flaws, malfunctions or maintenance issues, and it noted the involvement of aviation medicine and psychology experts in the investigation.

Air India chief executive Campbell Wilson this week urged the airline’s staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about the crash, and said the investigation was “far from over”.

An Air India representative said the airline continues to co-operate with the probe.

When asked to comment on the Journal’s reporting about the pilots, a press officer for India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation and AAIB called it one-sided and declined to comment further.

Aviation disasters that may involve potential deliberate actions to crash planes might never fully be resolved, due to incomplete evidence and disagreement over analyses. In some cases, countries taking part in lengthy international accident probes have disagreed with each other’s final conclusions.

Plane-crash investigations can often last a year or longer, and new information that comes to light can contradict initial assessments.

A soft-spoken veteran and an energetic learner, Sabharwal, 56, was devoted to caring for his ailing father, friends and neighbours said. They said his father, who served as a bureaucrat in India’s civil aviation ministry, inspired his aviation career.

Sabharwal started his flying career in the early 1990s, attending the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi. The prestigious flight school, run by India’s civil aviation ministry, has trained pilots for Air India and Indian Airlines.

Kapil Kohal, an Air India pilot and friend of Sabharwal, overlapped with him for one year in flight school. Kohal said Sabharwal stood out among their classmates – very polite, never cursed, never drank alcohol, and spoke so softly that sometimes Kohal had to ask him to speak louder.

“He was a very reserved guy right from the beginning,” Kohal said.

Sabharwal’s serious demeanour, along with the way his eyes turned down at the corners, earned him the nickname “Sad Sack”, Kohal said.

Unlike other students’ messy quarters, Sabharwal kept a spartan room filled with the bare minimum. “If you open his cupboard, there were two formal shirts, two T-shirts, two pairs of shoes, one slippers, and one bag,” Kohal said.

Sabharwal was driven by a sheer love of flying, Kohal said, and showed a flair for mentoring younger students. When Kohal was assigned to shadow Sabharwal on a flight, he explained flying concepts better than some instructors.

He was “a middle-class boy looking at the sky and saying, I want to be there”, Kohal said.

Kunder, 32, had also dreamed of flying as a child, inspired by his mother’s three-decade career as an Air India flight attendant. His mother recalled his childhood travels with her to Singapore, Bangkok and Dubai.

His sister, Camille Kunder, said that when they played make-believe as children, Kunder always pretended to be a pilot. “He just loved everything about flying,” she said.

Kunder went to Florida at 19 to attend flight school, obtaining a US commercial pilot licence. Starting in 2014, he spent three years in India and Bahrain doing additional training and exams before Air India hired him in 2017.

He began on the Airbus A320, before Air India in 2022 switched him to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Where some other pilots might have been frustrated over learning a new aircraft, Kunder was excited about flying a bigger jet, friends said.

Family and friends described Kunder as a fan of superhero movies who taught himself how to build a PC from scratch, and in college nearly pursued a pro-esports career.

His sister said he regularly sent her jokes and Instagram memes, and would call her to laugh about them.

“His laugh is so contagious,” she said.

Contents of the flight’s cockpit voice recorders have been tightly held by Indian authorities and seen as key to helping fill out the sequence of events in the flight’s final moments.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the US National Transportation Safety Board, has sought to listen to the recording herself, say sources.

An NTSB spokesman said Homendy had been fully briefed on all aspects of the Air India investigation, including the cockpit voice recording and details from the flight data recorder. Homendy said her goal in working with Indian authorities was “to quickly determine whether the crash presented any immediate safety concerns to the travelling public”.

Boeing, engine maker GE Aerospace and the Federal Aviation Administration have not issued any safety bulletins or directives to 787 operators since the crash.

The NTSB is supporting the Indian investigation because Boeing designed the Dreamliner and GE its engines, while the FAA certified the plane for passenger flight.

The Indian authorities’ preliminary report finding that the fuel control switches were flipped in succession, one second apart, suggested a deliberate act, according to Ben Berman, a former senior NTSB official who helped oversee the US-led investigation into the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999.

Berman said that, prior to the engines’ fuel being cut, the report did not suggest anything out of the ordinary for what should have been a routine takeoff and climb-out.

“There was nothing to prompt the crew to perform emergency procedures, become stressed, or do anything except rotate the nose up and retract the landing gear, like they had done so many times before,” he said.

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