Air India plane crash - 240+ feared dead
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Anonymous
I wonder if it’s possible that the pilot had early onset dementia or something where he just didn’t realize that’s what those switches were? It seems weird to answer if the answer is that I’m suicidal and I’m trying to kill us all. I guess there’s no way to know. How awful. |
Anonymous
Sounds like shutting off the switches has to be a deliberate and somewhat complex action. Not like dementia. |
Anonymous
Switching off the fuel to both engines at a critical moment in takeoff and then turning them back on were very deliberate actions. Sometimes when people survive a suicide attempt they say they experienced immediate regret - the moment they jumped off the bridge, the moment they took the pills. And that may have happened here. But the plane didn't have enough altitude to correct for the sudden loss in thrust. It's not the first time pilots have crashed planes deliberately - EgyptAir, GermanWings, China Eastern, etc. Probably Air Malaysia too. |
Anonymous
Could always have been the first pilot who did it and either tried to frame the other, or was trying to make things difficult for investigators. |
Anonymous
| Deliberate attempt to destroy the medical school building it crashed into ? |
Anonymous
The best piece on this didn’t call it a suicide. It was high humidity and heavy air conditions the night of takeoff and he thought there was a burning rubber fire from the wheels in the landing gear that caused a smoke fire in the cockpit rendering the pilots unconscious from smoke and fumes, the plane continued flying out over the Indian ocean until it ran out of fuel then crashed and was lost. |
Anonymous
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Pilots have been looking for an alternative explanation to a deliberate action on pprune, but it’s hard to come up with one that is consistent with the timing of the switches being turned off, the long delay in turning them back on (10 sec after one pilot noticed), and the mechanics of the switches (the switches have to be pulled out and then turned).
The long delay in turning the switches back on is troubling. A mechanical issue that would cause the switches to malfunction seems unlikely because they were so simple. And the report doesn’t mention any further conversation between the pilots after one noticed the switches were off. You would think that pilots would immediately troubleshoot the problem together. I wonder if the lack of transcript after this point is an intentional omission because of the preliminary nature of the report, or whether the pilots then physically grappled over the switches, etc. Some have wondered if switches left in the intermediate position, that is, pulled out but not engaged in on or off, could fall into the off position, but the description of the switch as having a mechanical gate means that the circuit wouldn’t be connected unless the switch was resting in the on or off position. The report is well written and it’s clear that there is more information to come. There was an interesting detail that the aft black box was completely destroyed and no data was able to be recovered from it, but the forward black box was usable. https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/3e6e572bb0cd57e7/8d66090a-full.pdf |
Anonymous
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I just read a news article online this morning that there was a temporary gas shutoff to the plane’s engines.
Perhaps one of the pilots accidentally shut them off?? I doubt it was intentional…. If someone wanted to crash the plane why would they want to take 240+ innocent people down too? I wonder how the one survivor is faring since. I would have the worst case of survivor’s guilt ever. 💔 |
Anonymous
A pilot will do everything they can to hide any mental health issues. Those issues are disqualifying and, the drugs used to treat those conditions are also disqualifying in many cases. This creates an environment where you have a lot of untreated mental illness in the pilot community. Even a kid trying to get his pilot's license will be medically disqualified if it's found, or they report that they were prescribed ADHD drugs when they were around 12 and only took them for 6 months or so. When that happens, if they still want to pursue getting a pilot certificate, they have to jump through a LOT of hoops to disprove the diagnosis. Mental illness in the pilot community is the same for the public in general. They are just not allowed to disclose it, seek treatment for it, or control it through medication for fear of losing their careers. Sp to answer your question, no pilot has any mental issues that needs to be screened. They are all doing fine. Just ask them. |
Anonymous
There was no long delay but it takes a jet engine a long time to spool back up again and produce power. It's not like a piston engine where once you give it gas, it responds nearly immediately. |
Anonymous
Not a chance. It's not some casual act where they could be hit without some very deliberate thought and action like many of the non-critical, or less critical switches in the cockpit. |
Anonymous
No. They couldn't even taxi with the fuel cut off. |
Anonymous
| You can't accidentally turn off the fuel to both engines on a 787. The mechanisms don't work like that. There was a deliberate action by one of the pilots to do this to both engines at a critical moment in takeoff. Air India has always been a corrupt airline with many issues. It's not an airline that's going to catch pilots with issues. And clearly, something went horribly wrong with one of the Air India pilots. |
Anonymous
The report says: “ 08:08:42 Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position. One of the pilots asks the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so. 08:08:52 Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN 08:08:56 Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN This language sounds like the data recorder was able to detect when the switches were thrown, not when the engine produces power. I interpreted the report’s timeline as a ~10 sec delay between the time the pilot noted the switches in the CUTOFF position to the switches being placed in the ON position. Ten seconds is a long time between noticing that fuel has been cut off to correcting the problem, especially when both engines were failing and a crash was imminent without them. |
Anonymous
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This is hard to stomach
But I agree with the earlier poster re mental health issues. All of these orgs need to get real and acknowledge these happen and help people. Same with ATC |