Air India junior pilot asked why captain turned off fuel switches, sources say
The information, from people who asked not to be identified because they're not authorized to speak publicly, reveals for the first time who said what in the cockpit.
A preliminary report from India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau released last week included a description of the exchange, including one pilot's denial that he turned off the switches, without identifying the individual speakers.
Aviation experts had speculated that it was first officer Clive Kunder who had posed the question to captain Sumeet Sabharwal, given that Kunder was the pilot flying and would have had his hands full — one on the yoke commanding the wide-body into the skies, and the other on the throttle controlling the aircraft's speed. The Wall Street Journal previously reported who said what in the exchange.
The initial investigation showed that the fuel-control switches on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner were turned off immediately after the plane departed. While the move was reversed about 10 seconds later, it was too late to avert the June 12 crash that killed 260 people on board the plane and on the ground in the city of Ahmedabad.
How and why the switches came to be turned off — cutting the flow of fuel to the engines — are now the key lines of inquiry for investigators. Officials are probing whether it could be the result of a failure of the plane's systems or human error.
And while the new details add fresh perspective on the confusion in the cockpit during the 32 seconds between takeoff and crash, investigators still haven't drawn any definitive conclusions.
Earlier this week, India's civil aviation authority ordered an inspection of cockpit fuel switches on Boeing 737 and 787 aircraft operating in the country in an effort to ascertain whether the crash was caused by equipment failure.
Aviation psychologists and medical specialists are also involved in the investigation — a typical practice across the aviation industry — to probe the role of the pilots in the crash.
The first officer expressed surprise that the fuel switches were off and then panicked, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with U.S. officials' early assessment of evidence. The captain seemed to remain calm, according to the report. The Airline Pilots' Association of India has pushed back on human action as the cause.
The AAIB didn't immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside normal business hours. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which is assisting on the investigation, referred questions to the Indian authorities. Boeing also referred questions to the AAIB. Air India and GE Aerospace, which manufactured the engines, declined to comment.
Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said in a memo to employees on Monday that the report identified no cause and didn't make any recommendations. "I urge everyone to avoid drawing premature conclusions as the investigation is far from over,' he said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
2 days ago
- Japan Times
Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence — and Zen?
'Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except' — wrote Zen priest Daisetz T Suzuki (1870-1966) in 'Zen and Japanese Culture' (1959) — 'that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself.' This is puzzling. 'Intuitive modes of understanding' escape the ready grasp of minds fed on 'concepts' and 'intellectual formulas.' 'Release from the bondage of birth and death' is equally elusive. It's not the 'Western' intellect's view of things, nor that of most modern Japanese, whose thought processes, regardless of Zen's shaping influence over many centuries on traditional Japanese culture, are more 'Western' than Zen. In Zen, everything is not. Which seems to mean: nothing is. But doesn't. Because nothing, too, is not. Likewise life, death, self, I, you, subject, object, mind, thought. None of it is. It's all nothing. Which itself is not. The difficulties of writing about a manner of thought that denies everything language can express are clear enough. Suzuki, whose book (written in English) is a masterpiece of language used to transcend language, devoted much of his long life to introducing Zen to the West — not by making it comprehensible, which would have defeated his purpose; rather by making us comfortable (sort of) with incomprehension. Suzuki quotes at length numerous ancient sages. Extracting more or less at random: 'I see the emptiness of all things — no objects, no persons.' — Bukko (1226-86) 'I hold a spade in my hands, and yet I hold it not; I walk and yet I ride on the water buffalo.' — Fu Dashi (497-569) 'The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. ... As each of them is of emptiness and has no 'mind,' the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hands is not a sword, and the 'I' who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.' — Takuan Soho (1573-1645) Imagine Mahatma Gandhi reading that. 'Mahatma' — literally 'great soul' — is the title affectionately and gratefully conferred upon Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), first by India and then by the world — India which he led to independence, the world whose noblest souls he inspires to this day. 'I did not move a muscle when I first heard that an atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima,' he told American journalist Margaret Bourke-White. He was affirming, it seems, his unshakable faith in nonviolence. Nonviolence, he said, 'is the only thing the atom bomb cannot destroy. ... Unless the world adopts nonviolence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.' (All Gandhi quotes, as last month, are from 'The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work and Ideas,' edited by Louis Fischer.) Was he a saint? He himself denied it — what saint wouldn't? But if profound religiosity; utter selflessness; boundless love for God and all living creatures; the willing and even joyous endurance of suffering for the good of all, friend and enemy alike (he acknowledged no enemies); and refusal to deploy against his most violent, threatening and dangerous opponents weapons more powerful than love, truth, nonviolence and noncooperation — he claimed there were none more powerful — are measures of sainthood, we must at least accord him a measure of saintliness. Was he — unconsciously perhaps — a Zen man? No, is the gut response. Between this apostle of nonviolence and Zen priest Takuan's veneration of the sword there seems no common ground. Suzuki has much to say of swords and swordsmanship. 'Zen,' he writes, 'speaks of the sword of life and the sword of death, and it is the work of a great Zen master to know when and how to wield either of them. Manjusri (the bodhisattva of supreme wisdom) carries a sword in his right hand and a sutra in his left ... but the sword of Manjusri is not to kill any sentient beings, but (to kill) our own greed, anger and folly.' Maybe so, and yet, undeniably, as we read in the 18th-century 'Hagakure,' which Suzuki quotes with approval, 'The essence of swordsmanship consists in giving yourself up altogether to the business of striking down the opponent. If the enemy, too, is ready to give his life to it, you are then well-matched. The final outcome will depend on faith and fate.' The 'Hagakure' is a celebration of Bushido, the 'way of the warrior,' written by a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1719) who, bored and disgusted by the long peace of the Edo Period (1603-1868) in which it was his misfortune to have been born, yearning for bloodier days gone by and, he hoped, to come, wrote, 'The way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. Every day without fail one should consider oneself as dead.' Is the way of Gandhi death? Does the Gandhian sword of love, truth, nonviolence and noncooperation speak the same language as the sword of steel, 'sword of life' though Zen calls it? Certainly Gandhi faced death as boldly as any samurai. The nonviolent, he wrote, 'would offer themselves unarmed as fodder for the aggressor's cannon. ... The unexpected spectacle of endless rows upon rows of men and women simply dying rather than surrender to the will of an aggressor must ultimately melt him and his soldiery.' The ideal man or woman, he wrote, 'is a devotee who is jealous of none, who is a fount of mercy, who is without egotism, who is selfless, who treats alike cold and heat, happiness and misery, who is ever forgiving, who is always contented ... who has dedicated mind and soul to God ... who is versed in action yet remains unaffected by it...' Arrested frequently by authorities against whom he protested (however nonviolently), he called jail his 'temple' and said one could be happy even there — or rather, 'the follower of dharma (the ultimate reality of Hinduism and Buddhism) trains himself to do without things (or accept privation) with happiness ... for happiness ... is not the opposite of unhappiness. It is superior to that state. The devotee of the (Bhagavad) Gita is neither happy nor unhappy. And when that state is reached, there is no pain, no pleasure, no victory, no defeat, no deprivation, no possession.' Zen's sword might have repelled him but there was Zen salt in him, and a dialogue, we imagine, between him and Suzuki would have been friendly; no doubt fruitful as well. We'd arrange it if we could. Gandhi's fate was tragic. Ours is not the world he strove for, and he died staring in the face the overwhelming probability that it would not be. The spinning of cloth, which he strove to spread among the masses as their liberation from poverty and India's from modern industrial capitalism, which he abhorred, failed to take root. Nonviolence stronger than the atom bomb? It was not stronger than Hindu-Muslim hatred; there they were, India's two great religions, their devotees slaughtering each other en masse and without mercy before his very eyes even as India celebrated its rebirth as an independent nation. Brotherhood? The execrated, persecuted 'untouchables' of the Hindu caste system remain execrated and persecuted, despite his exhausting campaigning on their behalf. Circumstances, the world, human nature, call it what you will, may have defeated him — but victory over himself he did win. Months before he was assassinated by a Muslim zealot, he foresaw his assassination (given the emotional climate it was not difficult). He said, 'If I am to die by the bullet of a madman I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips.' And so it was. His last words, as he breathed his last: 'Oh, God.' Michael Hoffman is the author of 'Arimasen.'
NHK
3 days ago
- NHK
Children in Hiroshima learn about atomic bombing aboard restored streetcar
Children in Hiroshima have taken a ride on a streetcar damaged by the 1945 atomic bombing to learn about what happened to the city then. A total of 31 third-grade students from Hiroshima University Elementary School took part in the annual event ahead of August 6, which will mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic attack on the city. The students boarded the restored street car, which is still in service, and toured the city. An official from Hiroshima Electric Railway, which operates the streetcar, told them that the train's wooden parts had been burned in the bombing. But its metal parts remained, making it possible to restore the train and keep it in use. The children also compared the landscapes they could see from the train's windows with photographs taken shortly after the atomic bombing. A boy riding the train for the first time said he was amazed to realize that the once-devastated city has transformed into a beautiful place where people live happily in peace. A girl said the trip helped her understand how strong the atomic bomb blast was.
Japan Times
4 days ago
- Japan Times
New Delhi's river divers risk health in polluted waters, seeking treasures
At the crack of dawn, Ramu Gupta slings a blue bag onto his shoulder and heads to the Yamuna River in the Indian capital in search of his fortune. The 67-year-old is one of hundreds of gotakhors (divers) who go to the river to hunt for coins, trinkets, discarded bottles and shards of metal and wood that can be sold in Delhi's booming scrap market. "I earn approximately 5,000 Indian rupees ($58) in a month from this,' said Gupta, who spends his days working as a toilet cleaner near the shack where he lives. He saves the extra income for his two grandchildren, hoping to split it between them when they grow up. Hindus consider rivers as holy and pilgrims toss offerings including coins, coconuts and flowers into the water for the 'river goddess' who sustains lives by giving water for drinking and irrigation. They regard the Yamuna River, which originates in the Himalayas, as one of the most sacred in India, cremating the dead on its banks and throwing their most precious possessions, including jewelry, into the waters along with their loved ones' ashes. Gupta and his fellow divers swim beneath the polluted waters, often risking their health in their search for riches. Ramu Gupta, a 67-year-old man who goes to the river to hunt for coins and other valuables, carries a bag filled with plastic from the waters of the Yamuna River in New Delhi on June 26. | REUTERS He is at the river in the morning and evening seven days a week, and goes to his regular work during the day — a routine he has followed for 35 years. Arvind Kumar, 29, has been working on the river full time for nearly 12 years. "There is no fixed income from this kind of work,' said Kumar, who earns up to 600 Indian rupees per day on average, below the government's minimum daily wage of 710 Indian rupees for an unskilled worker. Mostly, the divers collect coins, bottles and plastics. Occasionally they might discover some slivers of gold. More rarely, gold rings and necklaces. Sometimes, they also find bodies, and then the police might call on them to help retrieve them. If they see people carried away by the currents, they might try to rescue them. This makes the divers "happier than the person rescued,' Gupta said. A devout Hindu, Gupta said he was not afraid of the river because he had the protection of "Mata Rani," the Hindu mother goddess. "So why be scared?" he asked. "If she wants, I will die, if she wants me to live, she'll save me.'
