The release over the weekend of the preliminary report on last month’s deadly crash of an Air India flight has stirred controversy in the aviation community with some asserting that the crash could have been caused only by pilot suicide.
Prior to the report’s release, speculation had swirled for weeks about the cause of the June 12 crash with commentators struggling to interpret grainy video and incomplete tracking data to explain why the plane rose only a few hundred feet after takeoff, then sank back toward the ground before striking the campus of a medical college, killing 19 on the ground and all but one of the 242 people aboard the plane. Some wondered if contaminated fuel might have caused an engine failure or if the flight crew had incorrectly configured the flaps or landing gear.
The 15-page report, which includes information gleaned from the black boxes, puts much of that speculation to rest.
According to the report, the Boeing 787 began its takeoff roll at Ahmedabad’s international airport at 1:37 p.m. The first officer, 32-year-old Cliver Kunder, was at the flight controls in the cockpit’s right seat with the captain, 56-year-old Sumeet Sabharwal, sitting to his left. Assuming that they were following normal procedure, Sabharwal would have been keeping his right hand on the throttle levers, ready to pull the engines to idle if he felt he needed to abort the takeoff.
The initial part of the takeoff roll went smoothly, and at 1:38:33 the aircraft reached 176 mph at a point of the flight known as “V1”: the last opportunity the flight crew has to bring the plane safely to a stop before the end of the runway. Past V1, if anything goes wrong, the flight crew has to keep flying the plane as best they can, no matter what. Accordingly, at that point it is customary for the captain to move his hand away from the throttle.
Two seconds later, the plane reached its takeoff speed of 178 miles per hour; four seconds after that, it lifted off the runway. Three seconds later, someone flipped the fuel cutoff switch for one of the engines, then one second later they flipped the switch for the other one. Both engines began to lose thrust as their fuel ceased to flow into their combustion chambers.
One of the pilots — it’s not yet clear who — asked the other why he had cut off the fuel. The other denied having done so. Ten seconds later, someone moved the fuel switches back to the “run” position.
The fuel began to flow, and the engines reignited. One began to generate increasing thrust, but it was not enough to stop the descent of the plane.
Five seconds after 1:39 p.m., just 30 seconds after takeoff, one of the pilots called “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Two seconds later, the black boxes stopped recording as the plane crashed in a fireball.
While the report declined to speculate as to whether the fuel switches could have been flipped accidentally, many pilots say that this would have been virtually impossible. After V1, neither pilot is supposed to have a hand on the throttle, so an unexpected jolt should not have been able to cause their hand to accidentally hit the switches. Also, the switches are designed in such a way that in order to move one from one position to the other, a person has to first pull it out. An accidental lateral shove by itself is not enough to cause it to move. What’s more, the switches are protected by triangular metal guards to prevent them from being accidentally hit.
The timing is also suspicious. The shutoff occurred just seconds after recovery from engine loss became impossible. The fact that the fuel cutoff switches were moved one second apart indicates that they had not simply been bumped in a single, unintentional act. Given all these facts, some aviation experts have concluded that one of the pilots must have shut off the engines’ fuel intentionally.
“There’s only one real explanation for why that happened,” said Steve Scheibner, an airline pilot who runs a popular YouTube Channel under the handle “Captain Steeeeve,” in a video posted Monday. “You can draw your own conclusions from that.”
In India, airline pilot Mohan Ranganathan drew headlines for publicly laying blame at the feet of the flight crew. “This is a case of deliberate human intervention,” he said. “It was not accidental.”
In response, two pilots unions in India pushed back.
One, the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), said in a statement released on Sunday that “there is absolutely no basis for such a claim at this stage … To casually suggest pilot suicide without verified evidence is a gross violation of ethical reporting and a disservice to the dignity of the profession.”
The president of another pilots union, the Airline Pilots’ Association of India (ALPA India), complained that “the investigation is being driven in a direction presuming the guilt of pilots and we strongly object to this line of thought.”
Pilot suicide is rare, but it does happen. In 1997, the captain of a Silkair flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Singapore apparently pushed the nose down into a nearly vertical descent and crashed. Two years later, the first officer of an EgyptAir flight from New York to Cairo waited until the captain had left to use the toilet, then pushed the plane into a steep dive and crashed it in the Atlantic south of Nantucket. In 2015, the first officer of a Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Cologne waited until the captain had left for a bathroom break, then locked the cockpit door, set the autopilot for zero altitude, and sat passively as the plane descended into the Alps.
While such cases are very uncommon, they occur in an environment in which aircraft, training, and maintenance have become so robust that truly accidental crashes are themselves increasingly rare. The human mind is harder to diagnose and fix than a mechanical flaw.
