The crash resulted in the deaths of 241 people onboard, leaving one passenger, 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, as the sole survivor.
An investigation into the crash was launched by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), with a preliminary report on the tragedy being released on Friday (July 11).
Though the retrieval of the black boxes from the Air India flight was made more complicated due to the damage done to the plane, they have since been collected by investigators for analysis.
According to the report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau the fuel control switches in the cockpit of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had been flipped, starving the engines of fuel.
Investigators were able to gather this data once the black box had been recovered, giving them access to 49 hours of flight data and two hours of cockpit audio, including from the crash.
The aircraft had reached an airspeed of 180 knots when both engines’ fuel cutoff switches were ‘transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec.’
The report added: “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.”
Today’s findings are just preliminary – meaning more investigating and answers for all those affected will be coming in the future.
There has been somewhat of a delay in sharing these initial findings, but that’s for very good reason.
Captain Steeeve explained that damage to the black boxes has further hindered investigators’ ability to retrieve the data they contain, saying: “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 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.
Captain Steeeve 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.”