By Bikram Vohra
THE PRELIM REPORT IS A GREAT DISSERVICE TO INDIAN AVIATION, TO THE PILOTS, THE CREW, THE PASSENGERS, THE FAMILIES OF THE VICTIMS AND THE FLYING PUBLIC.
Talk about making things so convenient that everyone is absolved of any blame except the pilots. After all, they’re dead and they
can hardly defend themselves. The AAIB has done a great disservice with the half-baked report on AI 171.
Let’s address the unwarranted inference that one of the pilots deliberately manipulated the fuel switches 3 seconds after takeoff. Let’s not be too clever about this. If a pilot had any such intention, he could have taken the aircraft to the ground without so much subterfuge and effort.
By not giving the full picture and creating a mystery over the voices, the report has muddied the waters. Perfect camouflage for not getting to the truth. There is no way the investigators haven’t recognized the voices. Each pilot has a separate mic.
Ask yourselves, would a pilot who has just set this aircraft on a disastrous course be in a position to discuss the matter and then watch the retrieval process? What a complicated scenario when all he had to do was put the aircraft’s nose downwards. At 400 feet, it would have been almost instant.
Also, there is no mention of the audio bedlam from warning systems and the other pilot yelling ‘What have you done’ and other expletives. Instead, you get a professional Mayday call.
I don’t buy it. There are microswitches between the Toggle switch and the fuel valves and fuel pumps.
They need to investigate more deeply if their malfunction can cause Toggle Switches to change positions internally!
It will also show corresponding changes in fuel pressure, temperature & fuel quantity. They all need to be correlated. What if the computers had malfunctioned and given the order?
We have just damned two pilots, agonized their families and are accepting a poorly drafted report that creates more questions than answers, which is an indictment of the whole process.
I doubt we will ever know the complete and total unvarnished truth. All we will be left with is the residue that there was a pilot who did The Dirty and took 260 lives. Really.
This is what we are expected to believe. Visualize the situation. The aircraft has just taken off and one of the pilots is now bending down and pulling two switches out of their gates, lifting them, taking them to CUT OFF and then pushing them back to the gate and then doing the same again while the other pilot says nothing.
Go to the simulator and try doing it in one second.
Who are they protecting and why?
Bikram Vohra is the Consulting Editor of Indian Aerospace & Defence.
