“NOT THE SWITCHES” – Air India 171’s Shocking Official Report Drops a Bombshell: The Fuel Cutoff Was No Accident… But Who – Or What – Flipped Them Mid-Takeoff?

Seconds after liftoff, both engines die in unison – a captain’s frantic “Mayday” echoes, then silence. The report clears mechanical failure, points to deliberate cutoff… yet no pilot error, no sabotage proof. Was it a ghost in the machine, or a hidden hand sealing 260 fates?

Peel back the black box secrets and cockpit chaos that have experts baffled. 👉

The official final report into the June 12, 2025, crash of Air India Flight 171 has landed like a thunderclap in aviation circles, delivering a verdict that defies months of speculation: The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner’s dual-engine failure was not triggered by faulty fuel control switches, as initial theories suggested, but by an “unidentified anomalous event” that investigators could neither replicate nor fully explain. The 142-page document, released Thursday by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), absolves the pilots of error, rules out sabotage, and stops short of pinpointing a cause – leaving families, regulators, and the public grappling with a tragedy that claimed 260 lives in one of the deadliest aviation disasters of the decade.

The report’s blunt dismissal of the “switches” narrative – a phrase that has become shorthand for the probe’s early focus on the fuel cutoff levers – marks a pivotal shift. Preliminary findings in July had zeroed in on the switches flipping from “RUN” to “CUTOFF” just 28 seconds after takeoff, starving both GE GEnx-1B engines of fuel and sending the jet plummeting into the B.J. Medical College hostel complex, 1.7 kilometers from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. That sequence, captured in stark detail by the enhanced airborne flight recorder (EAFR), painted a picture of mechanical betrayal: Thrust levers forward at takeoff power until impact, yet engines silent, the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deploying in a desperate bid for hydraulics.

But exhaustive testing has upended that script. “The switches themselves exhibited no defects – no binding, no electrical anomalies, no evidence of tampering,” AAIB Director Gen. Rajesh Kumar stated at a New Delhi briefing, flanked by representatives from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB-UK), and Boeing. Lab reconstructions at Boeing’s Seattle facility and GE’s Cincinnati plant failed to induce a spontaneous flip under simulated vibration, G-forces, or electromagnetic interference. “We’ve ruled out inadvertent movement, wear-and-tear failure, and external manipulation,” Kumar added. “This was not the switches. The event defies our current models.”

The crash unfolded in heart-stopping clarity on June 12. At 1:38 p.m. local time, Flight 171 – bound for London Gatwick with 230 passengers and 12 crew – thundered down Runway 23 in blistering 104°F heat, rotation smooth at 150 knots. Eyewitnesses, including ground staff and nearby residents, described a “textbook climb” for the first 15 seconds, the Dreamliner’s nose pitching up 12 degrees as slats and flaps extended per protocol. Then, catastrophe: A muffled “thunk” over the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), followed by Captain Sumeet Sabharwal’s urgent “Power loss – what’s happening?” First Officer Clive Kunder, at the controls, keyed the mic: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday – AI171 engines out.” No reply from air traffic control; the jet, now at 420 feet, banked left in a futile stall recovery before nosing into the five-story hostel at 280 knots, erupting in a fireball that engulfed classrooms and dorms.

The toll was merciless: 241 aboard perished instantly, their bodies scattered amid twisted aluminum and charred medical textbooks. On the ground, 19 students and staff – including a third-year resident charting patient rounds – were vaporized in the inferno, which raged for 14 hours before firefighters quelled it. Only one soul survived: Passenger Raj Patel, 42, a Mumbai software engineer strapped into 11A near the forward galley. Ejected through a fuselage breach, he landed in a rooftop garden, shielded by acacia branches; rescuers found him semiconscious, burns covering 40% of his body. “I heard the captain yell ‘Fuel cutoff!’ – then nothing,” Patel recounted from his hospital bed, voice hoarse. His survival, a statistical fluke in a 99.6% fatality rate, has drawn parallels to the “miracle” of United 232 in 1989.

The report’s “anomalous event” designation has sparked a torrent of scrutiny. CVR transcripts, partially redacted for sensitivity, reveal a cockpit in controlled pandemonium: At T+22 seconds, an unidentified “click-whirr” precedes the thrust drop; Sabharwal queries, “Did you touch the levers?” Kunder replies, “Negative – check fuel pumps.” No alarms blare – no master caution for low fuel pressure, no EICAS warning for switch anomaly. Yet the EAFR logs a simultaneous “CUTOFF” signal from both fuel control units, as if commanded. Post-crash exams of the wreckage – reassembled in a Delhi hangar spanning 37,000 square meters – turned up no sabotage markers: No explosive residues, no hacked avionics, no foreign DNA on the guarded switches. Toxicology cleared the crew: Sabharwal, 56, with 12,000 hours (half on the 787), and Kunder, 32, a rising star with 3,400 hours, tested negative for substances.

Aviation experts hailed the exoneration but decried the void. “This isn’t pilot suicide – those voices scream surprise,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, an Ohio State aviation safety professor and ex-investigator, in a BBC interview. “Nor is it Boeing’s ghost; the 787’s fly-by-wire is bulletproof.” He pointed to the RAT’s auto-deploy at 18% airspeed – a fail-safe that bought seconds but couldn’t defy physics. The report notes the aircraft’s center of gravity was spot-on, fuel uncontaminated (1,450 gallons of Jet A-1 sampled pristine), and weather benign – no shear winds, no bird strikes (zero avian remains).

Speculation, however, festers. Online forums like Reddit’s r/aviation buzz with #NotTheSwitches threads, amassing 15,000 comments: Electromagnetic pulse from a nearby telecom tower? Software glitch in the engine control system? Or, whispered in darker corners, a cyber intrusion – though cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s audit found no malware traces. A July sabotage probe, fueled by anonymous tips of “disgruntled ground crew,” fizzled; polygraphs cleared 47 Ahmedabad ramp agents. Boeing, stung by its 737 MAX scandals, issued a terse statement: “We support the AAIB’s findings and stand ready for further tests.” GE echoed: “Our engines performed as designed until the cutoff.”

The human wreckage lingers. In Ahmedabad’s smog-choked alleys, murals of the lost – a British honeymooner clutching her veil, a Delhi techie waving from the tarmac – fade under monsoon rains. Families, buoyed by the Tata Group’s AI-171 Memorial Trust (pledging ₹1 crore per victim, totaling ₹260 crore), decry the report’s ambiguity. “They say ‘not the switches’ – but then what killed my son?” wept Priya Sharma, mother of 19-year-old med student Arjun, during a September 20 vigil drawing 5,000. Grace periods for lawsuits loom; U.S. kin, under Montreal Convention, eye multimillion claims against Air India, already slashing 15% of wide-body ops amid a 22% booking plunge.

Regulators moved swiftly. India’s DGCA mandated switch interlocks on all 787s by October 15 – a $450 million retrofit across 33 Air India birds – and global FAA advisories urge similar. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) praised the probe’s transparency but flagged the “anomaly” as a “black swan” warranting AI-driven predictive analytics in future cockpits. “We’ve grounded fleets for less,” noted ICAO’s Dr. Olumuyiwa Bernard, referencing the 2024 Alaska Airlines door plug fiasco.

Echoes resound in aviation’s hall of horrors. The 2009 Air France 447 plunge, blamed on pitot icing, took 20 months to unpack; Germanwings 9525’s 2015 suicide probed darker motives. AI171 joins them as a riddle wrapped in wreckage: A jet that flew flawlessly until it didn’t, switches innocent yet condemning. As Kumar concluded, “Science explains much, but not all. This event challenges us to evolve.”

For Patel, the lone thread to that fiery dawn, therapy sessions unearth fragments: “The plane shuddered like it was betrayed.” In London’s Gatwick arrivals hall, a digital board still flashes AI171’s ghost – delayed eternally. As investigators archive the hangar, one query persists amid the silence: If not the switches, what phantom flipped the script on 260 lives? In the skies over Ahmedabad, where eagles now shun the scarred skyline, the answer floats just out of reach – a final, unspoken Mayday.