The first official report on the tragic Air India crash is finally out.
The plane was heading to London Gatwick but went down just half a minute after taking off from Ahmedabad airport, in western India.
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There were 242 people on board, 169 of whom were Indian. There were also 53 from the UK, a Canadian passenger, and seven from Portugal.
Sadly, 241 didn’t make it. Only one person survived, a 40-year-old man named Vishwash Kumar Ramesh.
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, or AAIB, took charge of figuring out what went wrong. They’ve recently released their early report on July 11.
Investigators begin their search for answers
The black boxes were pretty beat up, which made things harder for the investigation team. Still, they managed to recover them and start digging into the data.
Turns out, the main issue was in the cockpit. The fuel switches on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner were flipped, which basically cut off fuel to the engines.
Data from the black box reveals a chilling detail
Once they got the black box working, they were able to pull up a lot of info — 49 hours of flight data and two hours of cockpit audio. That included the final moments before the crash.
Right before it all went wrong, the plane was flying at 180 knots. Then both engine fuel switches were moved from RUN to CUTOFF just one second apart.
A brief but alarming cockpit exchange was recorded
The report shared a short exchange between the pilots.
It adds: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.”
The findings are still in the early stages
These results are just the first look, not the full picture yet.
There’s still more to check, and more answers to come for the people affected by the crash.
Captain Steve explained why it took a while before this report came out
The black boxes were damaged, which made the job a lot tougher.
He said: “If you got a flight data recorder that’s not damaged at all you can simply plug a cord into it hook it up to a laptop and retrieve the data. It gets much more complicated when they’re damaged.
“And so clearly with these they couldn’t just plug into them and retrieve the data. So now you’ve got to get the box physically out of the airplane… And then you got to take that thing and you’ve got to get it someplace where somebody can interpret it.”
The short flight duration complicated analysis
The crash happened so fast, which made things more complicated.
The expert went on to say that interpreting the date certainly wouldn’t have been easy for investigators considering the plane was only in the air for a very short period of time.
Crash happened fast, but figuring it out takes time
Captain Steve said: “Since [issues] happened so close to one another it’s almost like a tangled ball of yarn. It can be straightened out, it can be undone but it’s much more complicated than a long string of yarn that has a couple of knots in it…
“That’s why it’s taken so long up to this point and it may take much longer for them to do it and to do it properly. If I’m leading that investigation I want to make sure that we get the proper answers, the correct answers, before we go to the public.”
