Posts about: "Fuel Cutoff Switches" [Posts: 802 Pages: 41]

If the vast majority of flights have been made without anyone performing this particular action slip previously, without dismissing it, but giving it due consideration as a risk with potentially deadly consequences on every flight, is there a case for reviewing the procedure at the end of the flight, to cutoff one, count to 5 or 10, and cutoff the other, or have each crew member take care of "their" engine at that point?

I'm assuming that isn't an original idea, so how is it already addressed by Boeing, or the airlines, or pilots?

I don't disagree that strange stuff happens. However the plausibility of such things is important when determining a likely sequence of events, not just that they're "possible".

I have to totally disagree with that. Publicly released CVR transcripts are edited to remove things like swearing, shouts, screams, etc. Basically stuff which investigators consider not directly relevant to the chain of events in the cockpit and determining actions taken or not taken. Nor do I necessarily trust that brief transcript released is all that was said. If one pilot had said "why did you move the switches to cutoff you *******!!!!!" and if he had shouted it, none of that tone or colourful language would be in the public transcript. You would get exactly what was released in this case.

After 9/11, many countries and airlines changed their jumpseat policies, restricting access to the flight deck to active crew members only. That was a knee-jerk reaction. Imagine there had been jumpseaters on the doomed 9/11 flights — wouldn’t they have tried to stop the cockpit intruders? With jumpseaters present, the pilots would at least have stood a better chance of defending themselves and avoiding being overpowered so quickly.

After 9/11, reinforced cockpit door locks were also introduced. But did that really make aviation safer? Consider Germanwings 9525, or MH370. On narrowbody aircraft, these locks don’t even prevent a group of terrorists seated in one of the front rows from storming the cockpit when the door is opened for a meal or a bathroom break. And yet, after GW9525, no one suggested removing the locks — despite the fact that they contributed to that tragedy.

Instead, many airlines — including mine — introduced a policy requiring that no pilot ever be left alone in the cockpit. But to what end? Would a flight attendant really be able to stop a determined pilot from committing suicide? It takes only seconds to shut off fuel control switches, pull engine master switches, and activate fire handles. A flight attendant could just as easily do those things, or take the cockpit fire axe and attack the remaining pilot, then lock the door. How rigorous are the background checks for flight attendants compared to pilots?

And now, in the US, some pilots are even allowed to carry guns in the cockpit. How long before that leads to catastrophe? I fear it’s only a matter of time.

I suspect there will again be knee-jerk reactions to AI171. Perhaps making it harder to operate critical switches? Would that really improve safety? Or installing CCTV in the cockpit? Would that prevent pilot suicide, or simply make it harder to hide? And would the cost and complexity really be worth it?

In my view, the biggest opportunity for improvement lies not in aircraft design, but in human resources. How can we better support pilots who are feeling down, stressed, or depressed? I don’t believe every crash necessarily calls for a technical or procedural fix. In this case, I see no compelling reason to change the aircraft itself.

Of course, the one sure way to eliminate pilot suicide would be to remove pilots altogether and fully automate flight. But I believe it will take a long time before such a system is truly safer than what we have today.

The best course of action for now is the same as in many situations in the cockpit: sit on your hands, resist the urge to act impulsively, and thoroughly investigate what would truly be the most effective response.

In my country, the ministry of transport has adopted the goal of “zero” road traffic fatalities. That’s unrealistic — even absurd — unless you ban all forms of transport altogether.

Perhaps we should acknowledge that not every incident or accident needs to be followed by a remedial action. In the case of AI171, any action we take should focus squarely on human factors.

With all due respect, that question has been asked and replied to many times. Please do a search in the threads and you will find the answers.

If you read the report, you'll see that the throttle was set to full power throughout, and the engines relit when set to RUN.

The. question about enforcing idle throttles before CUTOFF has been discussed voluminously on this thread.

It is both fascinating and unsettling to observe how the media in India consistently refuse to acknowledge that suicide may be the most likely scenario. Key voices—such as former pilots and the airline pilots' union—continue to dismiss the possibility that a pilot could have deliberately moved the fuel control switches to the cutoff position. They rely on factually incorrect arguments and emotional reasoning. For instance, some suggest a potential defect in the Boeing 787’s fuel cutoff switches. However, the FAA's Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB) they reference was specifically issued for the Boeing 737, not the 787.

An overview of public statements made by pilots in the media can be found here.
https://feitoffake.wordpress.com/202...room-in-india/

Well, perhaps it isn't yet viewed as proven, and unless or until more evidence emerges that may or still not establish that, doing something by mistake is usually more likely. Historically in most contexts there are far more mistakes (including non-fatal) than suicides

Attention, Wall of Text incoming. Take appropriate precautions and fasten your seatbelts!

It is a bit difficult to not appear to use statistics in this fashion when trying to refute people using made up numbers and stories as argument.

If you had read the articles you quoted you might have realized that the basis for these "media reports" is a single individual who "heard from some Air India pilots". The supposed source wouldn't even have any way to actually know about the claimed information. Unless you want to elevate the Company Rumor Mill to hard evidence standard. This stands against:

Can we please stick to the actual facts, like za9ra22, and not spread baseless rumors that are self contradictory to begin with?

I find this a particularly concerning statement coming from someone who claims to be a pilot. Things like "Action Slip" and "Mental Load" should have been covered extensively in any CRM related education. If you think you are exempt from that kind of failure you are rejecting some very costly lessons learned over the last 50 years of accident investigation.

There have been many accidents where unindicated or even counter indicated action was taken by one or more pilots involved. As discussed in the first and second thread extensively many pilots could report incidents where they observed someone retracting flaps instead of gear. There have been major fatal accidents with pilots shutting down healthy engines instead of surging or burning ones. There's good reason the 787 has extensive takeoff configuration warnings, because we have had accidents and incidents with unsafe configurations taken to takeoff, beyond and sometimes even into a crash. Humans make mistakes. It is the goal of Safety Culture to prevent those mistakes from causing harm.

It was certainly mentioned. I'd not say it was discussed in any big way. Someone mentioned that for Embraer this is indeed the default, I haven't really found anything beyond that, despite considering it a worthwhile train of thought and possible recommendation as a result of this investigation.

This is a topic of actual research: https://www.pmhc.org/research
Currently 12.6% of pilots meet the medical threshold for depression, with a slight but below average difference between males (12.8%) and females (11.4%), with 4.1% of all pilots experiencing recent suicidal thoughts. https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/...940-016-0200-6

It should be noted that the utilized test (PHQ-9) is considered insufficient to assess suicide risk. Depending on scoring these values could be about average, or significantly below average. Based on their wording I would expect the latter, because their methodology does not specify severity.*1 Results of 0-4 points suggest no intervention necessary, 5-9 (classified as mild) simply suggest retaking the test after a few weeks. Research shows that for the general public Major Depressive Episodes have a prevalence of ~5-10%, with the prevalence of minor depression being less studied but significantly higher than major depression. There is also significant symptomatic overlap of mild depression with stress related conditions such as "Burnout" (if you know, please don't, this conversation is already complex enough without bringing that in). Considering the prevalence of stress in the industry I am actually surprised the numbers here are not higher. The lesser delta between males and females could be indicative of just such an issue, meaning that based on the data available the number of pilots actually suffering from depression could be less than even the comparably low number reported here. The actual suicide risk is usually orders of magnitude below even that but not easily covered in this data context due to the test used.

Cognitive impact is highly variable depending on the individual, actual symptoms and severity. It would be wrong to assess that 12.6% of pilots are a risk factor from this data. Quite the opposite, in fact. After the Germanwings crash the topic was discussed and has reached the awareness threshold for many. Mild cases usually require little to no intervention beyond raising awareness and helping the brain fix its chemistry through positive reinforcement. This can be as simple as taking PTO, reducing work hours, or focusing on social or physical activities. In the past 10 years these kinds of low impact measures have been made more readily available, most notably during the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting turmoil.

Further political activity has lead to some positive action as well. I already mentioned the recent success of the Pilot Mental Health Campaign getting legislation through Congress for improvements of the outdated FAA guidelines on mental health in an earlier post. Similar efforts are underway globally, be that internal review within regulatory bodies, or political movements.

Keeping what I wrote previously in mind I would still caution against extrapolating your personal experiences too far. Having family in the field and having volunteered myself I can certainly relate, albeit with far fewer and less impactful personal experiences. The research is obviously lagging and we haven't really understood the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic generally, let alone in all its intricacies. There is indeed an observable global trend. Some correlation has been shown to climate anxiety, but other factors like the deteriorating condition of international relations as well as a global rise in movements against individual rights are obvious sources for this trend as well.
This is certainly a challenge for healthcare everywhere, but I do not consider the data available to be majorly applicable in the context of aviation over the already very current research closer to the industry and GA. The positive impact of what has been done and is being done is highly likely to outperform whatever global mechanism is at work here. It's certainly a very important field of study, but based on the data I would still consider the industry and regulators as a global whole to be on a positive path.

We can certainly discuss this topic further, but I would not currently see it as likely to be causal in this particular case.

Overall I am still not convinced we are looking at an individuals mental health crisis in this case. I have already detailed the massive differences to all known or suspected cases of pilot suicide at least twice. There is no evidence of mental health issues for the Captain or the FO. There is certainly a strong indication for a human factors cause to this accident. And as mentioned above I find the idea of improving the safety of the Fuel Cutoff Switches a worthwhile topic to discuss. No single action, and I see these two switches as a single action just as much as operating both thrust levers, should be able to cause a major accident. I find it perfectly reasonable to require the Throttle Levers be at idle for the Cutoff Switches to work, and in case of an incorrect setting some sort of alert would be appropriate.

*EDIT*
*1: I missed this in my original readthrough, the cutoff is sensibly set to 10, starting with moderate depression. I'd have to look into the classification scheme but from memory both mild and moderate depression fall into the same category as relevant for the following statements.

I even saw a video of an Indian expert -I believe he claimed to be a B787 jockey- explaining how it would be physically IMPOSSIBLE to put both switches in the OFF position within 1 or 2 seconds. I'll try to find it again when I have more time.

Please explain.

Fact is both fuel cutoff switches moved to the cutoff position three seconds after the wheels left the runway. While the speed was 180 knots. Nothing indicates a problem with the thrust of the engines.
So explain why one of the pilots , a ghost, an iPad set *both* switches to cutoff just after liftoff while the aircraft had a normal speed and no indications of a problem.
Mind there is no issue with those switches. The FAA SAIB was for the Boeing 737
https://feitoffake.wordpress.com/202...787-explained/

There is just one explanation: one of the pilots deliberately set both switches to cutoff.

Let me fix that statement for you:
"There is a reasonable explanation: One of the pilots set both switches to cutoff."

There is no known evidence for the claim of intent. There are documented instances of pilots making fatal mistakes out of the blue. Human Error is by far the more likely explanation.

I would love to explain, but my posts get deleted.

While I fully understand that a normal working fuel cut off switch on a Boeing can not move to cut off by itself, I'm completly certain that it can when the locking mechanism is not properly installed. In such a case, the moving part of the lever could even stand on a "needle point position", meaning it's neither in the on or off position. Smallest movement of the aircraft or a hand can move the lever to on or off.
I also observed many pilots in my career holding their hand at the backstop of the thrust levers on the pedestal as PM. Comes from a certain mistrust to the other pilot (mostly captains do that). If this hand falls down by a gust or a bump on the runway, his hand falls down on the pedestal. Exact location of the cut-off switches. If the locking mechanism isn't installed, you don't even feel that you moved it.

Dani

Driving a car is totally different than flying an aircraft. Pilots are trained over and over again for certain scenario's. The hands of a pilot during the liftoff have no reason at all to be anything near the fuel control switches.
When the fuel needs to be cut because of an engine failure there is a strict procedure before the switch is set to CUTOFF. Both pilots need to confirm the location (left or right) of the engine. No pilot will without consent switch off the fuel. However this is what happened.

The video doesn't answer two questions:
- The report reveals information about some conversation between the pilots confirming they both became at some point aware of the cut off. Was the recovery of the position of the switches as fast as possible in the captain's opinion.
- Does the captain interpret the Why question as a guess of the pilot who asked it, instead of asking as a witness of the transition?

Potential issue with the locking feature of fuel control switches of the Boeing 787 is a * red herring*. There is no such issue. There was an issue on some Boeing 737 aircraft. The FAA requested operators of other Boeing made aircraft to check if their aircraft had switches with a similar issue. No reports of such issue are known.
See https://feitoffake.wordpress.com/202...787-explained/

So your scenario is impossible.

The preliminary report states:
How common is such a repeated replacement of the throttle control module?
Are there records that on this or similar type, after a replacement of the throttle control module, the fuel control switches became defective, and how ?
What type of switches are they: SPST, SPDT with 3 wires used ? For SPST or equivalent, is "cutoff" the "make" or "break" state ?
Is there a common connection for the two switches, like a ground return or common live?

Someone who \x93claims\x94 to be a pilot eh? Let\x92s just accept that I\x92m not going to paste 40 years of military and commercial aviation logbook pages on here to appease your concerns or alleviate your doubts.

Nor do I claim to be exempt from that type of failure. Quite the contrary - I\x92ve experienced it. But I\x92ve never experienced reaching for a completely and utterly unrelated switch/lever in a totally different location such as fuel control switches versus landing gear levers (which are literally at opposite ends of pilot reach) on a Boeing (or Airbus) either in the sim or the real aircraft. Even with gear vs flaps, those errors occur where controls are proximate, or with controls that both involve \x93retraction\x94 (ie a similar action), or which have a similar method of operation, or which look vaguely similar in outward appearance. None of these principles apply here. So please, be my guest and find it as concerning as you like. And with that, you have convinced me to bow out of this discussion. Cheers.

I doubt the engines will start if those switches were neither in the on or off position, most probably the electric contact behind will not close and happen. also both at the same time? and since the position you mention is not a detention it would require time and ability to position them exactly in the middle without them going either side

I'll offer a guess as to why...later.
Why do you assume that improper installation?
How many times have you moved those switches, and the engines started without the switch being in the RUN position? (Either in the sim or in the aircraft).
Has anyone demonstrated to you something like
"watch this, Dani: if I pull the switch up and get it to hang on the little lock/cam, the engine will still start" ... in the sim or in the aircraft.
I'd be interested to read of your experiences with that switch and that non-standard positioning of it that you describe.

Beyond that, did you bother to look at the position of the fuel control switches that were in the preliminary report?
They were found in the RUN position. See page ten of the preliminary report.
Neither of them was cocked off, as in the picture of a misaligned switch from a 737 that you referred to.
On a 737.
The bulletin was Issued seven years ago. Why do you assume that people in the business sat on their hands for seven years?
Right. The facts are that the two fuel control switches were both found in the RUN position, not cocked to the side as your example from a 737 illustrates. Your entire line is unfortunately sunk by your attempt to challenge that fact.
You have established no basis for why you believe that the switches on this 787 were incorrectly installed, given that

1. the aircraft's crew (on the previous flight) successfully turned the fuel on and off on the flight from Delhi
2. the aircraft's flight deck crew successfully turned the fuel on, to RUN, before starting engines on the flight from Ahmedabad.

Your case is unsupported by the facts at hand.
As to post deletions: as with some of mine being deleted, we both seem to get involved in the running rodent machine despite any intentions to avoid it.

For DaveReidUK
Your post is, at best, disingenuous. (But thank you for posting an excerpt from the bulletin ).
The error was found on a 737, and the competent authority issued that alert having recognized that similar switches might have similar problems - they used the word potentia l - not because switches on all of those other models had been found to have that problem.
From your subsequent post:
I will also ask you whether or not you believe that airline companies the world over have sat on their hands for the last seven years, as regards fuel cutoff switches.
Given that this is the year 2025, (and the maintenance actions mentioned in the preliminary report) 1spotter's point on the "red herring" is a bit stronger than you allow. Please go back and read page 6 of the prelim report, top half.

Something else to think upon: how many 737s does Air India operate?
Does that have a relevance to this accident?
For the moment I don't think that it does, however, it might. The investigators have a variety of other rocks to turn over and see what crawls out from under them.
They may find evidence of various maintenance issues that have an impact on this accident.
As of today, though, such information has not been released (but I will offer you a guess that all of that is in the process of being collected and analyzed, even now, as a part of their investigation).

Full disclosure: I don't fly Boeings, I do not work for Boeing, I have no shares in Boeing stock, and I am still slightly pissed at Boeing for the MCAS screw up on the 737-MAX.

While I agree with your point entirely, I don't find it unusual or unexpected that there is resistance among many to accept or even acknowledge the possibility of suicide, but at the same time, it's no more fixated than the alternative camp which argues that suicide is the only possibility - and often promotes it via as erroneous 'evidence' as that suggesting the cutoff switches are faulty and the SAIB 'proves' it.

There's a genuine problem with understanding what 'evidence' means, and both sides seem to be suffering it.