The preliminary report on the crash of Air India Flight 171 was released on Friday, shedding new light on the actions of the pilots moments before the devastating crash, which killed 260 people.
According to the report, both fuel control switches were simultaneously turned off, which immediately turned the engines off while the plane was in the air, just seconds after taking off from India’s Ahmedabad Airport on June 12, BBC reports.
A voice recording of the cockpit was recovered and captured one of the two pilots—it is not known which one—asking the other why he “did the cutoff,” while the other pilot replies that he didn’t.
The switches were flipped back “on,” and one of the engines restarted, but the other engine “could not arrest core speed deceleration,” according to the report.
First officer Clive Kunder, 32, was flying the plane during takeoff, with Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, 56, monitoring the flight. The preliminary report does not recommend any actions to change engine operations or manufacturing.
The plane was 400 feet in the air when Captain Sabharwal made a frantic mayday call. The aircraft had reached a peak of just 625 feet before it crashed, according to data from FlightRadar24.
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau began probing the tragic accident on June 13, one day after the crash.
The team conducting the investigation included an aviation medicine specialist, an Air Traffic Control officer, and representatives from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Only one of the 242 people aboard the plane—Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national—survived the crash by escaping through an opening in the fuselage. The incident marked the first time a Boeing 787 crashed, according to the Associated Press.
The aircraft that crashed was 11 years old and had made 700 flights in the year leading up to the crash, according to Flightradar24 data. According to Forbes, the average commercial plane is 14.8 years old.
