A file image of the Air India plane crash (Photo: IANS)
Trust our national media, abetted by so-called “experts”, to prematurely jump to conclusions about what happened when an Air India plane bound for London crashed after taking off from Ahmedabad on June 12, killing around 270, in the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade! The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, with 242 people on board, headed for Gatwick Airport, had only one survivor after it crashed onto a medical college hostel, thereby adding to the fatalities.
The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), mandated to examine the accident, has released its 15-page preliminary report, causing a flurry of comments, no matter that it contains no conclusive evidence but merely reiterates the sequence of events that led to the accident. Obviously, two factors are integral – the make and condition of the aircraft, and human error. It needs to be noted the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which began flying commercially in 2011, is one of the safest aircraft in operation.
Although its maker, the US-based Boeing company, has been facing flak on the safety of its aircraft, the reference had been directed more to the 737 MAX, which had been involved in three fatal disasters. Nor was this particular aircraft too old to be operated – it flew for the first time in 2013 and was delivered to Air India in January 2014, a decade-long period not considered to be unsafe for operation.
As for the pilots, while one of them was a veteran with years of service, the co-pilot, too, had clocked sufficient flying hours. The AAIB has refused to lay any blame on them – all it has done is meticulously state the facts, including the unusual ones.
It noted that both engines of the plane had shut down midair within seconds of takeoff and both fuel cutoff switches, which control the flow of fuel to the engines, moved from ‘Run’ to ‘Cutoff’ position within a second of each other.
The report said that in the cockpit voice recording, one pilot could be heard asking, “Why did you cut off?” and the other replies, “I did not do so”. Fuel switches for engines 1 and 2 were returned to ‘Run’ within seconds, indicating relight efforts, but by then it was too late, since N2 values in both engines had fallen below minimum idle speed.
The media, naturally, seized on such smatterings of information, and has had a field day fronting “experts,” who discovered ominous indications on an accidentally shot video, which showed that the landing gear was down at a phase of flight when it would typically be up. Although the AAIB itself has refrained from making any conclusive surmise as to whether it was machine or human failure that caused the disaster, the media is bent on zeroing in on the latter, a stance rightly objected to by the Airline Pilots’ Association of India.