UPDATE. July 14, 2025

The preliminary crash report on Air India flight 171 is out, and what it says is startling.

It contends that at the moment of takeoff, both fuel control switches “transitioned” from the RUN to CUTOFF positions, essentially killing both engines.

One of the pilots is then heard asking the other why he did this. The second pilot responds that he did not. (Which pilot was speaking to whom is not specified.)

A few seconds later the switches transitioned back into the RUN position. The engines began spooling up again, but there was nowhere near enough time for them to produce adequate power.

In other words, it seems that one of the pilots switched off the fuel intentionally.

Or did he? Notice the investigators’ use of the word “transitioned.” The report is not fully clear as to whether the data recorder was tracking the flow of fuel independent of the switch position, or if it shows the switches themselves were, in fact, physically moved by hand. If they weren’t, it remains possible that an electronic glitch in the plane’s digital engine control system could be the culprit.

But if the switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370.

As preposterous as the idea of a pilot mistakenly shutting off the engines sounds, I’ll note that it’s happened before. Consensus, however, is trending toward premise number two.

At least to me, though, the dynamics of the crash don’t really fit the suicide theory. You’re saying that the pilot’s plan was to cut both engines and let the plane glide into the ground? That seems an awfully conservative scheme. There would be a lot of unknowns in such a scenario, and no guarantee that the ensuing impact would be as disastrous as it turned out to be.

Just to the left of the impact zone was an area with no buildings and fewer obstructions. Perhaps with just a little more altitude they could’ve reached it, resulting in a crash that was partly survivable. Calculating the exact impact point ahead of time would’ve been nearly impossible.

Further, the second pilot denied shutting off the engines when queried by the first one. Why?

Rumors are circulating that the captain was going through a divorce and had been treated for depression. Whether or not this turns out to be true, just keep in mind that although depression sometimes turns people suicidal, only in the rarest cases does it also turn them murderous.

One thing that should pique interest is the report’s inclusion of a Boeing service bulletin issued a few years ago. The concern was fuel control switches failing to properly lock. The bulletin pertained to 737s, but the same basic switch is used on the 787 as well. Is it possible the fuel switches on Air India 171 were defective, and were moved from RUN to CUTOFF by nudge or vibration?

 

UPDATE. July 9, 2025

The focus now is on the fuel control switches. These are a pair of manually positioned cockpit controls that effectively turn the engines on or off.

These switches lever-lock into place cannot move automatically. Whichever position investigators say they were in, a pilot had to put them there.

If an engine fails during flight, one of the steps in securing that engine is to shut off its fuel control. In the case of Air India, what’s being whispered is that an engine may have failed on takeoff, and one of the pilots then grabbed the wrong switch, thus rendering both engines inoperative only a few hundred feet over the ground.

The biggest problem with this idea is that engine failures aren’t handled this way. All pilots are trained to wait until a safe altitude — usually at least a thousand feet — before commencing any steps to secure or troubleshoot a malfunctioned engine. You don’t start moving critical controls until there’s adequate time and altitude. Additionally, any time a fuel control switch is lifted out of the RUN position, both pilots must verbally confirm the correct one is being manipulated.

Is it possible a pilot could’ve have reacted in a panic and done exactly the wrong and catastrophic thing? Yes, and it’ll be quite troubling if it turns out one fuel control switch was found in RUN, with the other in CUTOFF.

And what if they were both found in CUTOFF? Well, putting aside the a possibility that the plane was crashed on purpose, this would make some sense. One of the steps addressing a dual engine failure — rare as such things are — is to cycle both fuel control switches. That is, move them from RUN to CUTOFF, then back again.

If something in the plane’s electronics went haywire and caused the engines to lose power simultaneously, we can imagine a desperate crew, with only seconds to spare, attempting the re-start process, with both fuel controls repositioned to CUTOFF and not enough time to get them on again.

Nothing in the preliminary report will be definitive, but if the switches were found in different positions from one another, this hints at pilot error. If both were found in CUTOFF, this hints at a dual failure and a last-ditch re-start effort.

 

UPDATE. June 24, 2025

It’s looking more and more likely that flight 171’s ram air turbine (RAT) was indeed deployed just prior to the crash. If so, this more or less confirms a loss of power in both engines.

Why it lost power is another issue altogether, and a potentially calamitous one for Boeing.

See below for more.

June 15, 2025

AIR INDIA flight 171 plunged into a neighborhood seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad airport on Thursday afternoon, killing more than 270 people. The exact death toll is uncertain, as the search for bodies continues. One passenger survived.

My rule this soon after an air disaster is to avoid conjecture. Crash investigations can run for months before causes are nailed down, and first-glance theories, however convincing they seem in the moment, often turn out to be wrong.

That being said, evidence suggests the Boeing 787 suffered either a loss of thrust in both engines, or an inadvertent retraction of the plane’s flaps and slats before reaching sufficient speed.

The plane climbed to only about 400 feet above the ground (the 650 feet being reported by the media is the altitude above sea level), leaving the pilots no time to troubleshoot or turn back. All they could do was glide straight ahead. The flight path was stable, but the jet slammed into buildings at over 150 miles-per-hour, exploding into a fireball.

The loss of thrust theory is evidenced a few different ways. Most notably, one of the pilots, in a mayday call to air traffic control, reported power loss to air traffic control. In addition, some of the video footage appears to show deployment of the 787’s ram air turbine (RAT), a device that extends from the fuselage automatically, triggered by the loss of both engines, to provide flight control power. The “bang” heard by the surviving passenger could have been the RAT dropping into place, and the buzzing noise in one of the videos could be the sound of the device doing its thing (it’s essentially a propeller driven by the oncoming air). The footage is grainy and unclear, however.

Engine failures are rare. A loss of both engines is exceptionally rare. A bird strike, a la Captain Sullenberger, would be one possible culprit, but so far nothing points to this. Other possibilities include a malfunction of the 787’s electronic engine controls, fuel contamination, or ingestion of runway debris. There’s also the chance, however far-fetched, that a pilot shut the engines down, either out of carelessness, or, in a worst-worst-worst case situation, deliberately.

Getting back to those grainy videos, it’s hard to see much detail, but the wings look strikingly “clean,” which is to say the flaps appear retracted. Flaps, which extend from the trailing edge of the wing, together with slats, which extend from the front, provide critical lift at low speeds. Jetliners almost always take off with these devices extended (the particular setting varies with weight and runway length). The pilots then retract them incrementally as speed increases. Perhaps in this case they were brought up inadvertently — or by way of some bizarre malfunction — immediately after takeoff, resulting in a loss of lift without enough altitude for recovery.

Then we have the landing gear. It was not retracted after liftoff, as normally would be the case. Curiously, this hints at either of the two scenarios just discussed. In the first one, we imagine the pilots, distracted by engine warnings and a sudden loss of power at the worst possible time, simply neglecting to raise it. In the other, a pilot mistakenly retracts the flaps rather than landing gear. The probability of such a mistake is absurdly low, but it’s bigger than zero.

On the other hand, the 787’s aerodynamics are uniquely sculpted, and when the flaps are extended the wings take on a camber, a smoothly downward curve, front-to-back, that makes the flaps less conspicuous than they are on other airplanes. Looking at videos of 787s taking off under normal circumstances, loads of which can be viewed online, those wings, too, look very clean. And photos from the crash site show a wing with flaps and slats that appear to be extended, at least partly.

The stronger evidence points towards power loss. My hunch is that something went wrong with the jet’s digital-electronic engine management system.

Whatever it was, the data and voice recorders will tell us shortly. That would be the how. Figuring out the why might take more time. For Boeing’s sake, let’s hope it’s not a design flaw buried in the plane’s high-tech architecture.

This is the worst crash since the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, more than a decade ago. As of June 20th the body count is 274 people, including dozens killed on the ground.

The media keep reminding us how terrible the last twelve months have been for aviation, with at least four high-profile accidents. It hasn’t been a good run, but as I underscored in a recent post, historical perspective and context are important. Even including the past year’s spate, we see far fewer plane crashes than we used to. Heck, in 1985 there was a serious accident every 13 days, on average (including the bombing of an Air India 747 that killed 329 people). Multiple deadly disasters were once the norm, year after year. This is no longer the case, despite the number of commercial flights more than doubling since the 1980s.

 

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Photo courtesy of Unsplash.

APROPOS OF the death of filmmaker David Lynch, I dug up this photo from a few years ago.

There I was, watching Lynch’s proverbial cult classic “Eraserhead” in an Emirates first class suite. It had been ages since I’d seen the movie and was surprised to discover it in the airline’s catalog.

I can’t think of a stranger venue in which to have watched this movie. If you know “Eraserhead” you’ll know what I mean. The contrast was ridiculous: the luxury of the cabin and the industrial bleakness of the film.

It was great to see it again, and the experience was extra-enjoyable thanks to the Bowers & Wilkins noise-cancelling headsets that Emirates provides in first class. Sound was always such an important element in Lynch’s movies, especially in “Eraserhead,” and the ambient whooshing racket of Mach .84 at 35,000 feet might otherwise have drowned out that critical aesthetic.

That said, I was never a huge fan of Lynch’s work, save for this one and “Blue Velvet,” which I probably watched 62 times and at one point had most of the dialogue memorized.

Meanwhile I can thank various inflight entertainment systems for having introduced me to many of my favorite movies and TV series.

I discovered “Arrested Development” on a business class seatback screen several years after it went off the air. The same with “Flight of the Conchords,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Louie,” and, more recently, an excellent drama from England called “Happy Valley.”

I’m old enough to remember when airlines used to project movies onto a blurry bulkhead screen. If you didn’t fancy the carrier’s choice of the day, well, you were out of luck and had to read a book or peruse the inflight magazine. If you were lucky, on a longer flight, they might show two movies.

For the audio, they’d pass out plastic, stethoscope-style headsets that would plug into the armrests. The actors sounded as if they were yelling at each other under water.

 

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A Planespotting Memoir.

December 4, 2024

WHAT WERE YOU DOING on December 4th, 1980? Chances are you have no clue. Owing to my eccentric habits of memory, I can tell you exactly what I was doing. I was flying to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a four-day vacation with my parents and sister.

I was a freshman in high school, thirteen years old. Distant ago as it was, my recollections of that long weekend are, you’ll likely agree, startlingly specific. This is owed, maybe, to the impressionability of the adolescent mind, but also the degree to which I savored trips by airplane. Short as it would be, this was a vacation I’d spent weeks looking forward to, with most of that adrenaline focused on the flight.

The morning of the fourth was a Thursday. I’m so sure it was a Thursday that I’m not going to burden Google with the keystrokes to double check. It was also cold; the temperature had plummeted overnight, making the thought of a respite in sunny Puerto Rico all the more appealing. I can remember, our bags packed and waiting for our ride to Logan, standing by the door that led to our back porch, and marveling at how the glass had frosted over, all white and crystalline. A man on the kitchen radio said it might drop into the teens.

We flew economy class on an Eastern Airlines L-1011. It was my first time on a TriStar and only my second time on a widebody jet. The cabin was maybe half full. I moved around, and at one point had a center block of seats all to myself.

A movie played on the cabin bulkhead screen, blurry and distorted, but I didn’t watch it. Instead I listened to music, clamping on a pair of those awkward, stethoscope-style headphones some of use are old enough to remember, with the little caps on the end that scratched into your ears. The Pat Benetar song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” was popular the time. I had no prior fondness for that song, but something about how it sounded, coming through that blue plastic tube, enthralled and energized me. I listened to it over and over. (You couldn’t rewind on the old audio systems, so I’d wait patiently while cycled through a dozen other songs.) The chorus would be stuck in my head for days.

We stayed at the El San Juan, a mediocre hotel just a short drive from the airport. I have a memory of beige or yellow stucco. The hotel was on the beach, with backside rooms overlooking the ocean. The room they gave us, however, was on the city side, five or six floor up, and when I pulled back the curtain I was astonished to realize we had a view of the airport. Specifically, we could see the entire approach end of SJU’s runway 8, plus a good portion of the adjacent taxiway. Planes touching down would soar right past our balcony, while those taxiing for takeoff would trundle by in plain view.

This would be a problem. For as much as I wanted to swim and enjoy the warmth of the Caribbean, I also wanted to sit on the balcony with my binoculars and watch jets. We hadn’t traveled much, and my planespotting had been limited mostly to Boston, with its predictable roll call: Eastern, Delta, Allegheny, TWA, plus a smattering of European traffic. San Juan, though, was like nowhere I’d been — an airport of Latin exoticness. Here would be planes and airlines I’d only seen pictures of.

I unlatched the glass door and stepped outside, taking in that tropical smell of heat, humidity and vegetation, with the whine of turbojets in the background. As my mom, dad, and sister put their swimsuits on, I became more and more reluctant to leave that balcony.

Two things solved my dilemma:

The first thing was the weather. Thursday afternoon had been sunny, and Susan and I spent a good two hours in the water battling the four foot breakers. By the morning of day two, however, it had turned damp and drizzly and cool. And the forecast said it would stay this way — overcast, with periods of light rain — right through our departure on Sunday.

The second thing was a hamburger. I’d consumed this burger in the hotel restaurant on Thursday evening. By midnight I found myself in the throes full-on food poisoning, vomiting and feverish. I camped out in the bathroom for I don’t know how long, sitting in the harsh fluorescent light, listening to a radio station from the Virgin Islands. I can clearly remember the garish red-and-white pattern of the tiling.

And so, after an abbreviated and fitful sleep, I awoke on Friday morning to gray skies, a low simmering fever, and a very troubled stomach. Swimming or sightseeing was out of the question. About the only thing I could do, and would do, is watch planes.

It’s not that I wasn’t disappointed. Enamored as I was with aviation, I wasn’t going to forsake the the warm-weather pleasures of San Juan for something as nerdy as planespotting. But now that weather had gone south. And, I was sick. I now had a viable backup plan, enjoyable and distracting enough to salvage my vacation.

I have no idea what my parents and sister did over the next 48 or so hours. I assume they went shopping, or maybe took a rainy-day tour of El Morro. But I know what I did: I sat in a metal chair with my Bushnell 10x42s and a notebook, hunkered down like a postmodern birdwatcher, logging the arrivals and departures at San Juan International Airport. Rain and illness were a bummer for sure, but on another level I was elated.

Back at home I had a book, the 1980 edition of “World Airline Fleets.” This was an annually published directory with the registrations and specs of every commercial plane in the world, arranged alphabetically by country and airline. Once a plane once was “spotted,” you could mark it with a check, or, as I did, line through the listing with a highlighter. Later, at our dining room table, I’d take out the notebook from San Juan and meticulously transpose each sighting.

Neither that notebook nor the fleets volume survive (the one in the photo was found online). Like most of my memorabilia from that era, it was carelessly and foolishly discarded. My memories, on the other hand, are intact, perhaps to a point of almost preternatural detail. How and why I’m able to recall such things is something I can’t fully explain; after all, there are significant tracts of my life that I remember little from. I’ve forgotten names, places, birthdays, phone numbers, the when and where of so many events. But I can tell you without hesitation which planes I saw coming and going at the San Juan airport in December, 1980.

There were, for starters, the multicolored Herons of Prinair, the Puerto Rican commuter carrier whose route network island-hopped the Caribbean. The Riley Heron was a peculiar bird, with 17 seats and four piston engines. That weekend was the only time I ever saw a Heron, but surely I logged the entire Prinair fleet three times over. Every minute, it seemed, a Heron was puttering by.

I remember the American Airlines “Inter-Island” Convair 440s. Those too were piston-powered, precursors to the American Eagle turboprops and regional jets that would later serve San Juan. I saw the old Jetstreams of Dorado Wings, an Air Haiti C-46 Commando, and any number of Douglas DC-3s, anonymous in dirty silver paint. I saw a DC-9 in the colors of BWIA, an Aviaco DC-8, an Iberia DC-10 coming in from Madrid, as well as my first Pan Am DC-10, a plane inherited during the merger with National Airlines earlier that year.

The highlight, though, had to be the Lockheed Constellation. It wore the red and white livery of Argo S.A., a Dominican freight outfit, with the registration HI-328. I watched it take off and land at least three times, so it must have been shuttling back and forth. This was the only operating Constellation I ever saw, or ever would see. You can find several photographs of HI-328 online, where you’ll also learn that it crashed into the ocean near St. Thomas about a year later.

And that was my holiday.

On Sunday afternoon the skies cleared, just in time for our trip home. We took off in darkening twilight at around 4 p.m. Once again we were aboard an Eastern L-1011. This time we were upgraded to first class, a 2-2-2 cabin done up in fudge-brown leather.

We all have our ways of recalling our lives, our chronological cues. For me, the demarcations are so often those of airplanes, trips, and places visited.

I’m frustrated, though, by the selectiveness of memory. I can remember the registration I.D. of a particular airplane, which is cool (I think), but what I can’t remember is what sort of path I expected my life to actually take. What was I thinking? I wanted to become a pilot, that I knew. But I was such a lazy little shit of a kid, with no real idea of how to make that — or anything else — happen; how the steps towards that goal were actually my responsibility. Something, somebody, would take care of it for me, I assumed. It would all just work itself out.

I think I became a pilot in spite of my love for aviation, not because of it. I got lucky.

On Monday, December 8th, I was back in class at St. John’s Prep School, where I was a moody misfit freshman with no friends. Nobody believed I’d been to Puerto Rico, because I didn’t have a tan.

 

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