Air India captain may have shut off fuel ahead of deadly crash, WSJ reports
Dialogue heard on a cockpit voice recording indicates that the captain of the Air India flight that crashed in June, killing 260 people, may have turned off the fuel just after takeoff, prompting the first officer to panic, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources familiar with U.S. official's early assessment.
A preliminary report released last week included detail about the switches, saying the fuel to the plane's engines appeared to have been shut off just seconds after the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner lifted off.
According to that preliminary report, shortly after takeoff, the plane's fuel cutoff switches for both engines went from the "RUN" position to the "CUTOFF" position, one after another within one second -- shutting off fuel to both engines.
In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he hit the cutoff switch, according to the preliminary report. "The other pilot responded that he did not do so," that report stated.
The WSJ report added detail to that conversation, saying the dialogue "between the flight's two pilots indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that controlled fuel flowing to the plane's two engines," according to the WSJ's sources.
The president of the Federation of Indian Pilots condemned the Wall Street Journal report, saying, "The preliminary report nowhere states that the pilots have moved the fuel control switches, and this has been corroborated by the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] recording."
"Let the investigation team investigate in detail," the president, Charanvir Singh Randhawa, said in remarks Thursday while echoing earlier comments from India's minister of civil aviation to "wait and have patience until the time the final report comes."
In the wake of the crash, Air India said this week that "precautionary inspections" of the locking mechanism of the fuel control switches on all of their Boeing 787 aircraft found no issues.
ABC News' Clara McMichael contributed to this report.
