Black Box Revelations: Final Moments Of Flight 171 Unveiled Amid Investigation

Initial conclusions about the tragic 260-person Air India crash have been made public.

Last month, Air India Flight AI171, which was headed to London Gatwick, crashed 30 seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad airport in western India.

According to the company’s statement, out of the 242 passengers on the flight, 169 were Indian, 53 were British, one was Canadian, and seven were Portuguese nationwide.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, was the only passenger to survive the catastrophe, which claimed the lives of 241 other passengers on board.

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) opened an investigation into the incident, and on Friday, July 11, they published a preliminary report on the tragedy.

The damage to the aircraft made it more difficult to get the black boxes from the Air India flight, but investigators have subsequently gathered them for examination.

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau reported that the Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s engines were starved of fuel because the fuel management switches in the cockpit had been reversed.

After the black box was recovered, investigators were able to collect this data, which included two hours of cockpit voice from the disaster and 49 hours of flight data.

When the fuel cutoff switches for both engines were “transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec,” the aircraft had already hit 180 knots.

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.”

The results of today’s investigation are very preliminary; further research and solutions for all impacted parties will follow.

These preliminary results have been a little slow to be shared, but for 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.”

Given that the jet was only in the air for a brief amount of time, the expert continued, it would not have been simple for investigators to interpret the date.

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.”