Four months have passed since a Boeing Airliner, Air India Flight 171 crashed immediately after takeoff. A crash that was caught on video. The following is the most interesting analysis I had come across. It was posted to an Indian Subreddit by what appears to be an Indian pilot or aviation professional. Today I decided to re-read his analysis, only to find it deleted, allegedly by him (If you trust Reddit). His Reddit account was also deleted. I have however managed to recover the text of his analysis, which I had saved. And I am posting it here for posterity.

Air India Flight 171 – The only two possibilities that could’ve happened. Share your thoughts below.

I’ve been devastated ever since I read about the Air India crash. It has been haunting me, lingering at the back of my mind ever since it happened. What made things worse was the preliminary report released two days ago.

For those who haven’t seen it, the report indicates that the engine fuel control levers (ECLs) were moved from the RUN to CUTOFF position roughly 9 seconds after takeoff. The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) captured one pilot asking the other: “Why did you cut off?” to which the other replied, “I did not.”

Following this, many aviation experts, pilots, and media channels went into a frenzy, with some suggesting deliberate sabotage or even an intentional mass murder scenario. While the evidence sounds damning, there are two plausible explanations for how this could have played out:

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Scenario 1: Uncommanded Engine Shutdown (Mechanical/FADEC-related)

• The aircraft takes off and achieves a positive rate of climb.
• A FADEC (Full Authority Digital Engine Control) malfunction or some other engine control system failure causes an uncommanded fuel shutoff, starving the engines even though the physical ECLs remain in the RUN position. (Yes, A FADEC failure shuts off the fuel valves without changing the mechanical switch to cutoff).
• The pilots notice the loss of thrust and see the fuel cutoff lights illuminated. The Pilot Flying (PF) asks the Pilot Monitoring (PM) why he cut off the fuel, to which the PM responds that he did not.
• In an attempt to troubleshoot or follow restart procedures, the PF then manually moves the ECLs to CUTOFF and then back to RUN within seconds, trying to relight the engines.
• A mayday call is made to ATC. One engine successfully relights, but the second does not have enough time to spool up before the aircraft loses altitude and crashes.

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Scenario 2 – Intentional/Accidental ECL Movement (Human Factor) 

• The Pilot Monitoring (PM) for reasons unknown (could be intentional or due to spatial disorientation/startle effect) — moves the ECLs to CUTOFF shortly after takeoff.
• The Pilot Flying (PF), startled, asks why he cut off the engines. The PM denies doing so, which could either be genuine confusion (if it was unintentional) or intentional denial (if it was deliberate).
• The PF then quickly moves the ECLs back to RUN, attempts an engine restart, and issues a mayday. But the aircraft loses altitude before a successful relight can be completed.

Which do you think is the more likely scenario?

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Scenario 2 is highly unlikely, as further analysis shows that even if this was intentional, the time frame falls too short. In addition, there is reason to believe that some propagandists were hired to blackwash the pilot. To quote an insightful comment,

For redditors who are genuinely open-minded about the AI crash investigation and have not yet made up their mind:

In the prelim report, did you guys notice that the time interval between fuel switching, either from run to cutoff or vice-versa, is given in “whole seconds”, and not in decimal, or even in milliseconds?

I looked into it and the sampling rates of the FDR is generally ~ 1Hz , ie, it can only record between intervals of 01 seconds.

That clearly means that the time between 1st and 2nd switch being cutoff is anywhere between 0 and 1 seconds— so maybe it was 0.01 seconds, or maybe 0.99 — who are we to assume?

This also trashes all the discussions we were having about the human ability to manually flip a switch in 1 second, isn’t it?

There’s a far far greater chance that the flip happened in a few milliseconds which is NOT humanly possible. Most probably the switches went down instantly one after another and the FDR, with its slow 1 second sampling rate, could only record it as one whole second.

What are your views? Please don’t bother commenting if you’re gonna be snarky about it— if i am wrong i would appreciate a polite response.

Edit: it’s between 0 and 2 seconds, i wrote between 0 and 1 in my flow. But it doesn’t change anything. Imagine the fastest time a human could take between flipping two switches in mid air, let’s say 800 milliseconds, now any time interval from 0 to 800 milliseconds between the two flips, would be recorded as 1 second in the FDR, and can be considered a non-human input. A 40% probability.

USA was where the first mass-production cars emerged from. But look at them now. A Tesla cannot even be called a car, and is more of an abomination created by control freaks . Aviation also came out of USA, but shares a similar trajectory. I personally believe that Boeing should have quit civil aviation a long time ago, and should have stuck to milking the US Government through military contracts, black projects etc.

There are other theories as well, that even if this was a “Software Error,” the timing is suspicious. For example, if it happened mid-flight, then it could have been easily corrected as the plane had sufficient thrust. The “Error” was preventing the takeoff itself.