Preliminary report into Air India crash released

> The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off.

So the fuel supply was cut off intentionally. The switches in question are also built so they cannot be triggered accidentally, they need to be unlocked first by pulling them out.

> 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.

And both pilots deny doing it.

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

> 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.

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