Preliminary report into Air India crash released

> It's difficult to conclude anything other than murder-suicide.

You're leaping into the minds of others and drawing conclusions of their intent. One of them moved the levers. It could've been an unplanned reaction, a terrible mistake, or it could've been intentional. We may never know the intention even with a comprehensive and complete investigation. To claim otherwise is arrogance.

The car equivalent is being on a highway and "mistakenly" pulling the hand brakes, except that there are 2 hand brakes and you need to first unlock both of them.

That's very hard to do by panic and mistake, if not impossible by design.

> One of them moved the levers. It could've been an unplanned reaction, a terrible mistake, or it could've been intentional.

Fuel levers are designed to only be moved deliberately; they cannot be mistaken for something else by a professional pilot. It's literally their job to know where these buttons are, what they do, and when to (not) push them.

It's not arrogance to assume the most likely conclusion is true, despite how uncomfortable that outcome may be.

Bad analogy because pilots are trained and rehearse and practice memory items until they are instinctual.

> impossible by design.

Deflecting that the human is the weakest part of the system. One or other may have panicked and made a mistake, made a mistake unintentionally, went crazy and doomed the flight, or intentionally doomed the flight for some socioeconomic reasons. These are speculative possibilities that we don't know yet, and may never know; we only know what has definitely happened from the evidence per the investigation. It's standing way out over one's feet to declare from an armchair that it was "definitely" X or Y before the investigation is complete.

> cannot be mistaken for something else

Assumption. Big ass assumption.

Pilot are trained until actions are instinctual and certain memory items are almost unconscious. But pilots are still people and people are fallible and make mistakes, and sometimes act unreasonably. Intent cannot be determined without clear evidence or statements because that's now how thoughts locked away in people's minds work.

> It's not arrogance to assume the most likely conclusion is true

You don't know this. This is beyond the capability to know and is therefore pure speculation. That is the definition of arrogance.

Forget my words then and take those from aviation experts.

The fact that a pilot would cut off fuel from both engines, in sequence while taking off is virtually impossible to happen unless deliberate.

Hence the hand brake comparison, it does not come natural to use it while driving.

It’s the explanation that requires the fewest explanations and assumptions I’d say.

It was done. Yes. There is no way to determine from the evidence why it was done, how much conscious or not thought was put into it, or the thought process behind it.

> You don't know this.

That it isn’t certain doesn’t change anything about it being pretty likely.

Unpleasant, but I suppose at least it means we won’t suddenly see other planes falling out of the sky due to fuel switches being set to off.

Bare in mind there have been there have been what, 100+ million flights? so "virtually impossible" things can, and will happen

The most likely scenario is not necessarily the truth. It still remains pure speculation and nothing else.

> sometimes act unreasonably. Intent cannot be determined without clear evidence or statements because that's now how thoughts locked away in people's minds work.

By this logic it would be impossible to ever find anyone guilty of murder (or any other nefarious action) with intent unless they explicitly state that it was in fact their intent. Obviously this is not how justice works anywhere, because at some point you have to assume that the overwhelmingly most likely reason for doing an action was the true reason.

If someone pulls out a gun, cock it, aim it at someone and pull the trigger, killing the other person, should we hold off any judgement because they might have done it purely mechanically while in their head thinking about the lasagna they are going to cook tonight and not realizing what they were doing ?

The fuel cut off switches have a unique design, texture and sequence of action that need to be taken to actuate them, they don’t behave like any other switch. Pilot are also absolutely not trained to engage with those particular switches until it’s instinctual.

Courts do not seek to establish the truth. They aim for a reasonable balance between false positives (innocents convicted of crimes they didn't commit) and false negatives (criminals allowed to go free). In practice, the false positive rate is probably around 5%, and innocents go to prison all the time.

Air accident investigations mostly deal with one-in-a-billion freak occurrences. Commercial aviation so safe and reliable that major accidents rarely happen without a truly extraordinary cause.

On pprune there is a professional pilot that says they had multiple instances of inadverent switching off fuel switches. They do it every startup, shutdown and training captains (the captain on this flight was pilot not flying, he had >10k hours) do it all the time in the sim to trigger engine out scenario during training

I pull my handbrake every time I park my car, but never mistake it for the windshield wiper while the car is moving