Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has filed its preliminary report on the crash of Air India 171 plane with the Ministry of Civil Aviation and other concerned authorities, reports suggest, referring to top government officials who were briefed on it. The report is based on the initial appraisal and findings collected during the initial stages of the probe.
The report will be made public later this week, officials added.
Although the contents of the initial report are unknown, it's presumed that it will provide crucial information regarding the cause of the crash. On June 12, the Air India plane flying to London from Ahmedabad's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Airport crashed within 32 seconds of take-off, and 241 people on board, including 10 cabin crew members and two pilots, were charred to death. Former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani was one of the victims of the horrific crash. Only one person, sitting in seat 11A, survived the tragedy.
Also read: PAC to review Air India AL-171 crash; aviation officials called
The plane's black boxes — the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) — were retrieved in subsequent days, one from the roof of a building at the crash site on June 13 and the other from wreckage on June 16.
A week after the crash, at least three Air India training pilots on the airline's Boeing 787 jets attempted to repeat likely scenarios in Mumbai resulting in the crash. The pilots attempted to replicate electrical failures that would cause a dual-engine flame-out and cause the aircraft to lose climbing power after takeoff. They did not succeed.
The pilots also duplicated the exact trim sheet information of AI-171— a sheet utilised in aviation to compute and keep account of the weight and balance of an aircraft so that the center of gravity remains within takeoff, flight, and landing safety margins.
The investigators have extracted the information from the jetliner's black boxes and are analysing the location of the fuel switches on board the flight. They are attempting to validate the information with any remaining wreckage of the fuel switches found - and that would be critical in determining if any of the engines were inadvertently cut off by the pilots during the critical stage of the flight.
They are also probing whether a dual-engine failure would have caused the crash. Pilots of Air India's Boeing 787 aircraft are not trained to handle a dual-engine failure below an altitude of 400 feet, as happened in AI-171.
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