A cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots of the Air India flight that crashed last month indicates the captain turned off the switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane’s engines, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The newspaper cited people familiar with US officials’ early assessment of evidence uncovered in the investigation into the crash, which killed 260 people.
The first officer, who was flying the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, asked the more experienced captain why he moved the switches to the “cutoff” position after it climbed off the runway, the report said.
The first officer expressed surprise and then panicked, while the captain seemed to remain calm, the WSJ reported on Wednesday.
It has not been identified which pilot was caught on the plane’s black box recorder transmitting “Mayday, mayday, mayday” just before the crash.
London-bound flight 171 crashed into a medical college only minutes after takeoff from Ahmedabad, in western India, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. Another 19 people died on the ground and 67 were seriously injured.
India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Boeing and Air India did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the report.
The two pilots involved were Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and First Officer Clive Kunder, who had total flying experience of 15,638 hours and 3403 hours, respectively.
The Indian government has said Sabharwal was also an Air India instructor.
A preliminary report released last week by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau depicted confusion in the cockpit shortly before the June 12 crash, and raised fresh questions over the position of the critical engine fuel cutoff switches.
-with AAP
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