Lethe
Captain
For those still following the crash of Air India 171, this discussion involving former NTSB air safety investigators offers a comprehensive walkthrough and analysis of AIIB's recently released into the crash.
This is a long discussion that is low on sensationalism, but nonetheless the TL;DR is fairly straightforward: they're convinced this was an intentional act. Below is a timeline of events created by the channel authors that features in their discussion:
The Wall Street Journal that US officials believe it was the senior pilot, Sumeet Sabharwal, who turned the switches from run to cut-off. Key excerpt from the article:
A black-box recording of dialogue between the flight’s two pilots indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane’s two engines, according to people familiar with U.S. officials’ early assessment of evidence uncovered in the crash investigation.
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, these people said. The first officer expressed surprise and then panicked, these people said, while the captain seemed to remain calm.
Reuters is also running with a less informative version of this story.
In relation to the credibility of these anonymous officials and their assessments: a few days prior to the release of the AIIB preliminary report, mainstream media sources such as Reuters reported that the operation of the engine fuel cut-off switches was a key focus of the investigation. The preliminary report subsequently validated that assertion. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear to me just why U.S. officials would be given access to the Cockpit Voice Recorder output in sufficient detail (i.e. including the emotional presentation of each pilot in the critical seconds after take-off) to make the assertions that they have, particularly in light of other suggestions (as discussed in the video linked in my previous post) that AIIB has held foreign parties somewhat at arms-length from the investigation.
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