Isn‘t that an obvious non sequitur?
Also, meaningless.
You can “never give up” and still be totally negligent. See Air France 447.
The Indpendent reports the black boxes are going to the US. They may be damaged enough that the India lab did not want to tackle it.
Air India jet’s fuel switches in focus, as crash preliminary report nears
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A preliminary report into the deadly crash of an Air India jetliner in June is expected to be released by Friday, three sources with knowledge of the matter said, with one adding the probe had narrowed its focus to the movement of the plane’s fuel control switches.
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The investigation into the Air India crash is focusing on the movement of the engine fuel control switches following an analysis of the 787’s flight and voice data recorders, along with a simulation by Boeing of the aircraft’s final moments, one of the sources said.
The video below (from a pilot) agrees with this. He also notes that moving those switches almost certainly cannot be accidental. You need to make some effort to flip those switches.
- Both fuel control switches - which are used to turn the engines off - were moved to the cut-off position, the report says
- It says that in the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he “did the cut-off”. The other pilot, it says, responded that he did not do so
One of the engines able to restart after cutoff - reportpublished at 16:58
16:58
One section of the report explains how one of the engines was able to restart after transitioning to cutoff, but could not reverse the plane’s deceleration.
Engine 1’s core deceleration stopped, reversed and started to progress to recovery, the report says, while Engine 2 was able to relight but “could not arrest core speed deceleration”.
Well, that’s interesting.
Was there anyone else in the cockpit?
Is it just me or do others here think this seem a suicidal pilot? If the fuel switches were cut off that seems it has to be intentional. Not really possible to do accidentally.
I 100% get we do not know for sure yet. Pure speculation.
That was my first thought, in fact my first comment was initially “well, that’s damning”, but the fact that they managed to get both engines fired and one functional really made me unsure.
Which would make this the brain fart of the century. Unless the final report gives us more detail about the conversation in the cockpit we may never know.
And if one pilot was trying to take down the plane, and the other one trying to save it, you’d think there would be evidence in the voice records.
This seems really bizarre. Yeah, it might be the worst brain fart of the century.
I’m wondering if the fuel cut-off switch should be locked out at that time? Or if it’s possible to determine who touched it?
PDF preliminary report 15 pages.
Boeing critics who were eager to cast suspicion on the Dreamliner may be having uneasy moments.
However:
https://www.barrons.com/articles/boeing-stock-air-india-crash-report-c2f00f29
The video I posted shows that it is not just flipping a switch but getting by a detent to change position and that there are situations where the switch would be turned off then back on as procedure so a lock out would not be called for.
I’m surprised since both engines relit that there was not enough power to at least maintain level flight.
This all very strange. 
The switch is on-off. The engines require a fair bit up time to ramp up to usable thrust. The plane was already falling/stalling. LSL, Richard Pearse or other airliner pilots will be a long to give a more accurate time frame for regaining thrust.
Both engines relit in that the EGT started rising, but they weren’t developing any meaningful thrust. Engine 1 had managed to reverse the deceleration of the engine core and commence the process of accelerating while engine 2 had relit but the core was still decelerating so the FADEC was repeatedly reintroducing fuel.
Just to be clear, is the fuel cutoff switch position that the flight data recorder recorded (and that may be alarmed to the pilots)
- physical switch position as detected by an auxiliary contact and independently sourced circuit, or
- voltage after switch main contact present/absent?
I don’t know. The CVR would have noises that correlate to switch movements but the preliminary report doesn’t have that kind of detail.
My employer operates the B787 and has been in frequent contact with Boeing. Recent comms says they’re confident that this is not a fleet issue.
Airplane engines aren’t like your car engine, instant acceleration is not a thing. It takes them some amount of time to go from “not running” to actually generating thrust,
Also, an airplane like that is huge and massive, there’s a lot of momentum even when it’s moving slowly. The re-lit engines just didn’t have time to turn the descent into a climb.
These are reasons why engine failure at low altitude is such a dire situation. You have so little time to manage the situation and few options for a landing (basically - straight ahead, regardless).