Indian aviation experts believe that fuel supply to any aircraft could not be shut automatically or because of any power failure, as the investigation into India Airlines flight 171 crash points to a cut-off in the fuel supply to the engines.
Last month, the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner had barely left the runway at Ahmedabad airport when it hurtled back to earth. Everyone on board was killed, except for one passenger.
A preliminary report has found that the aircraft had reached an airspeed of 180 knots when both engines' fuel switches were "transitioned from Run to Cutoff position one after another with a time gap of 1 second.
"It has to be done manually. It cannot be done automatically or due to a power failure because the fuel selectors, they are not the sliding type," Captain Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation safty consultant, told India's NDTV. "They will always be in a slot. You have to pull them out and move them up or down."
When asked whether it was deliberate, and why would any pilot do that in the extremely critical phase of the flight, Ranganathan said that he had heard that the captain of the ill-fated flight had "some medical history".
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