So the fuel supply was cut off intentionally. The switches in question are also built so they cannot be triggered accidentally, they need to be unlocked first by pulling them out.
> In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.
And both pilots deny doing it.
It's difficult to conclude anything other than murder-suicide.
well hold your horses there... from the FAA in their 2019 report linked above:
> The Boeing Company (Boeing) received reports from operators of Model 737 airplanes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged. The fuel control switches (or engine start switches) are installed on the control stand in the flight deck and used by the pilot to supply or cutoff fuel to the engines. The fuel control switch has a locking feature to prevent inadvertent operation that could result in unintended switch movement between the fuel supply and fuel cutoff positions. In order to move the switch from one position to the other under the condition where the locking feature is engaged, it is necessary for the pilot to lift the switch up while transitioning the switch position. If the locking feature is disengaged, the switch can be moved between the two positions without lifting the switch during transition, and the switch would be exposed to the potential of inadvertent operation. Inadvertent operation of the switch could result in an unintended consequence, such as an in-flight engine shutdown. Boeing informed the FAA that the fuel control switch design, including the locking feature, is similar on various Boeing airplane models. The table below identifies the affected airplane models and related part numbers (P/Ns) of the fuel control switch, which is manufactured by Honeywell.
> If the locking feature is disengaged, the switch can be moved between the two positions without lifting the switch during transition, and the switch would be exposed to the potential of inadvertent operation. Inadvertent operation of the switch could result in an unintended consequence, such as an in-flight engine shutdown
Both of these extremely-experienced pilots say that there was near zero chance that the fuel switches were unintentionally moved. They were switched off within one second of each other, which rules out most failure scenarios.
If it was an issue with the switches, we also would have seen an air worthiness directive being issued. But they didn’t, because this was a mass murder.
I do not trust these air worthiness directives 100.0%. The 737 Max also required two catastrophic failures before it was grounded.
The fact that the pilots denied that they had shut the switch (one asking the other why they had done so and the other denying it), and that they restarted the engines should be taken into account. Ok, murder suicide is definitely on the table but I would want to see some other reasons for believing that this is so.
A note on the terminology: "evidence" is a piece of data that suggests a conclusion, while not being conclusive by itself. Whereas "proof" is a piece of data that is conclusive by itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Flight_...
But here's the thing a "near zero chance" when we are talking about an actual event changes the math
Maybe there's a combination of vibration and manufacturing defect or assembly fault or "hammer this until it works" that can cause the switches to flip. Very unlikely? Yes. Still close to 0% but much more likely in the scenario of an accident
Of course AAIB/NTSB etc didn't have any time to investigate the mechanical aspects of this failure
So yeah it was probably done intentionally but the "switches turning off by themselves" should not be excluded
Perhaps there are more qualifying statements that you meant to include? The certification and type rating requirements certainly differ between agencies, but in terms of raw number of flight hours it’s easy to find that this statement is false.
Doing it accidentally is impossible.
And yes, it does sound like it was probably intentional. I would still like to see an engineering review of the switch system. Are they normally open or normally closed, In the end the switch instructs the FADEC to cut the fuel, but where does the wiring go in the meantime? what software is in the path? would the repair done before the flight be in that area?(pilot defect report for message STABS POS XCDR), and perhaps compromised the wires?
My preliminary idea is a "fuel bladder" for take-off that inflates with enough fuel to get the plane to a recoverable altitude, maybe a few thousand feet?
Or maybe a design that prevents both switches being off (flip flop?) for X minutes after wheel weight is removed?
Again, it’s probably pointless but it’s an interesting thought exercise.
Suicidal pilots are apparently more common than we’d want.
Coming up with ad-hoc solutions is easy, especially the less you know about a complex system and its constraints. I'd say it's not an interesting exercise unless you consider why a solution might not exist already, and what its trade-offs and failure modes are. Otherwise, all you're doing is throwing pudding against a wall, which can of course be fun.
There’s always going to be many ways they could crash the plane, such a feature wouldn’t help. The pilots are the only people you can’t avoid fully trusting on the plane.
There's a balance of accidents to be found, I think. There are likely cases where fuel does need to be cut off to both engines, and preventing that would lead to accidents that might have been recoverable. This case shows that cutting off fuel to both engines during takeoff is likely unrecoverable. There have been cases where fuel is cutoff to the wrong engine, leading to accidents. Status quo might be the right answer, too.
Formally verified traditional algorithms.
If there’s a fire or similar problem the fire handles will cut off fuel without the normal shutdown procedure, but the normal switches only need to be used at idle thrust.
I wonder if Airbus has this logic, since their philosophy is to override the pilot commands if they’d endanger the aircraft (which has its own issues of course) where’s Boeing will alert the pilots and still perform the action. I don’t have access to that information.
As another commenter said the Airbus engine start/stop controls are located behind the thrust levers, and according to the A350 operations manual which I got my hands on there are two conditions required for the FADEC to command engine shut down: Run switch to off, thrust lever to idle.
So if that's correct on an Airbus aircraft you can't just switch off the engines when they're commanded to produce thrust. This also seems to be backed up by the difference in the guards for those controls in the Airbus cockpits.
Will the bladder be marketed by Kramerica Industries?
You are trying to draw parallels between the ignition switch in a 1974 Ford Pinto and a 2025 Ford Mustang as if there could be a connection. No.
"The FAA issued Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB ) No. NM -18-33 on December 17, 2018, regarding the potential disengagement ofthe fuel control switch locking feature. This SAIB was issued based on reports from operators of Model 737 airplanes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged. The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant airworthiness directive (AD) by the FAA. The fuel control switch design , including the locking feature, is similar on various Boeing airplane models including part number 4TL837-3D which is fitted in B787-8 aircraft VT-ANB. As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out asthe SAIB was advisory and not mandatory. The scrutiny ofmaintenance records revealed that the throttle control module was replaced on VT-ANB in 2019 and 2023. However, the reason for the replacement was not linked to the fuel control switch. There has been no defect reported pertaining to the fuel control switch since 2023 on VT-ANB."
So while I agree that this being the cause sounds unlikely, referencing the switch issue is something relevant enough for the report itself.
Edit: It also seems like the engine cutoff is immediate after the toggle. I wonder if a built in delay would make sense for safety.
(Presumably delaying the amount of time before a raging engine fire stops receiving fuel would also have an impact on safety?)
And with how low and slow they were during takeoff, those would have been going off almost instantly.
You're leaping into the minds of others and drawing conclusions of their intent. One of them moved the levers. It could've been an unplanned reaction, a terrible mistake, or it could've been intentional. We may never know the intention even with a comprehensive and complete investigation. To claim otherwise is arrogance.
That's very hard to do by panic and mistake, if not impossible by design.
> impossible by design.
Deflecting that the human is the weakest part of the system. One or other may have panicked and made a mistake, made a mistake unintentionally, went crazy and doomed the flight, or intentionally doomed the flight for some socioeconomic reasons. These are speculative possibilities that we don't know yet, and may never know; we only know what has definitely happened from the evidence per the investigation. It's standing way out over one's feet to declare from an armchair that it was "definitely" X or Y before the investigation is complete.
The fact that a pilot would cut off fuel from both engines, in sequence while taking off is virtually impossible to happen unless deliberate.
Hence the hand brake comparison, it does not come natural to use it while driving.
Fuel levers are designed to only be moved deliberately; they cannot be mistaken for something else by a professional pilot. It's literally their job to know where these buttons are, what they do, and when to (not) push them.
It's not arrogance to assume the most likely conclusion is true, despite how uncomfortable that outcome may be.
Assumption. Big ass assumption.
Pilot are trained until actions are instinctual and certain memory items are almost unconscious. But pilots are still people and people are fallible and make mistakes, and sometimes act unreasonably. Intent cannot be determined without clear evidence or statements because that's now how thoughts locked away in people's minds work.
> It's not arrogance to assume the most likely conclusion is true
You don't know this. This is beyond the capability to know and is therefore pure speculation. That is the definition of arrogance.
By this logic it would be impossible to ever find anyone guilty of murder (or any other nefarious action) with intent unless they explicitly state that it was in fact their intent. Obviously this is not how justice works anywhere, because at some point you have to assume that the overwhelmingly most likely reason for doing an action was the true reason.
If someone pulls out a gun, cock it, aim it at someone and pull the trigger, killing the other person, should we hold off any judgement because they might have done it purely mechanically while in their head thinking about the lasagna they are going to cook tonight and not realizing what they were doing ?
The fuel cut off switches have a unique design, texture and sequence of action that need to be taken to actuate them, they don’t behave like any other switch. Pilot are also absolutely not trained to engage with those particular switches until it’s instinctual.
Air accident investigations mostly deal with one-in-a-billion freak occurrences. Commercial aviation so safe and reliable that major accidents rarely happen without a truly extraordinary cause.
That it isn’t certain doesn’t change anything about it being pretty likely.
Unpleasant, but I suppose at least it means we won’t suddenly see other planes falling out of the sky due to fuel switches being set to off.
FAA issued a Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin SAIB NM-18-33 in 2018 warning that on several Boeing models including the 787 the locking mechanism of the fuel switches could be inoperative.
https://www.aviacionline.com/recommended-versus-mandatory-th...
Per FAA the checks were recommended but not mandatory.
Murder-suicide looks like the likely conclusion, given that flipping the cutoff switches requires a very deliberate action. That said, it's not entirely impossible that due to stress or fatigue the pilot had some kind of mental lapse and post-flight muscle memory (of shutting off the engines) kicked in when the aircraft lifted off.
Possible, and if so it is too early to conclude it was murder-suicide.
See also: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/dgca-slaps-80-lakh-fi...
There is speculation that in the Air France flight 447 that crashed into the ocean en route to Paris, one or the pilots only had 1h of rest because of partying the night before. Of course it’s all speculative, and however unlikely it is, eventually it’s bound to happen that we get pilots with poor mental clarity in charge of large Boeings with hundreds of lives on board. Unfortunately it only takes one lapse of judgement to compromise the flight profile of a large airliner, even if corrected after a few seconds.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2014/11/06/vanity-fair-the-h...
In this case I wonder if the fuel cut off switches could be replaced by buttons for particular situations. Have an engine fire button or a shut down whilst on the ground button. Let the pilot provide input on state and let the automation decide what to do with that. Obviously this is not a solution to suicidal or murderous behaviour. But it could be a solution to all the low probability edge cases.
However, the only relevant evidence that exists suggests they had enough rest. You don't build verdicts on suppositions, you build them on proven facts.
This does not guarantee you will reach the truth, but it's miles better than admitting every baseless hypothesis that comes up.
Don't sentence people on unfinished investigations. This is why most trials are not public, because of people like you.
No. Bad.
But why cutoff the fuel instead of flying into terrain? It's such a passive action
> As per the EAFR, the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC.
Damn. That's pretty quick to diagnose and take action.
Boeing's probably gonna have a big sigh of relief over this one.
The 787 is 15 years old, and this particular plane was 10 years old. It always seemed unlikely to be a major, new issue. My money was actually on maintenance.
I have to imagine that “You are flying” and “You just cut off all fuel to the engines” must generate a pretty obvious claxon of warnings.
Me: “The build is breaking right after you checked in. Why did you do that?” Him:”I did not do so.” Me: “The commit shows it as you. And when I rolled back everything builds.” Him:”It must have been someone else.”
That person was really annoying.
The weirdest thing was how often it worked for them. In each case their lying eventually caught up with them, but in some cases they’d get away with lying for years.
It’s amazing how often someone would have clear evidence against what they were saying, but the people in positions of authority just wanted to de-escalate the situation and move on. They could turn anything into an ambiguous he-said she-said situation, possibly make a scene, and then make everyone so tired of the drama that they just wanted to move on.
In that moment I realised he was just bare faced lying right infront of everyone, about a technical subject, only HE should be the expert in, and to this day I am perplexed why his contract kept being renewed.
Eventually I was let go ( he possibly suggested I be let go ) for an incident that was unrelated to me.
This is all fine, but i learnt 5 years on he was still being paid a top 1% salary at the same company.
I promise the point isnt that I am jealous, its that this guy, who was a sub par coder and liar, somehow managed to keep his job whilst everyone else lost theirs and earnt untold amount in England ( where salaries are always low).
My goodness - I just remembered he was found by police driving a vehicle seemingly under the influence on a motorway, work found out after the police called them, and somehow he turned up the next day at work , lied about it, and STILL kept his job.
I am only mentioning this guy , because he was NOT a nepotist hire, he was just some guy who would lie and somehow people were ok with it. I still think of him often and wish I could have learnt more from his abilities just out of interest.
The conversation would suggest that the switches were in CUTOFF position, but there is also a display that summarizes the engine status.
There is no conversation that mentions flipping the switch to RUN again.
EDIT: Why is there no Cockpit Video Recorder? The days of limited storage are over.
Pilots unions are dead against it.
Just allow cockpit video recorders, and if they're ever used for anything, the pilots (or their heirs) get $250k in cash.
Saying the union drove a decision is hardly "an assault on organized labor".
This would leave accident investigators with a lot of work to do to try to figure out how a collision happened.
Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor
Coverage (different constellations have different coverage, which means planes would not have transmit guarantees depending on flight path). So you’d have huge gaps anyways
There have been alternative solutions posed, some of which are advancing forward. For example, GPS aware ELTs that only transmit below certain altitudes. But even that has flaws
Anyways I think we’ll see it in the next decade or two, but don’t hold your breath
If you sent two updates a minute over Iridium, using their 25 byte message plan, you'd be looking at a megabyte per minute for the entire planet. That's such a tiny fraction of what that single constellation can do.
The cost of hardware and additional fuel consumption due to drag aren’t nothing, but the data used itself is essentially a rounding error. (Iridium for example has tiny antennas, and SBD data costs about a dollar per kilobyte, and position data is tiny.)
Of course, that’s all little help when a pilot acts adversarial; on MH370, the breakers for both satcom and transponder were likely pulled, for example.
I can pay $10 to have internet for the entire flight. Reasonably low bandwidth of course, but if I can splurge $10, the airline can.
That’s nonsense. Even when I’m flying right over the north pole my airline will give me unlimited in-flight internet for $20. Maybe antartica has worse reception, but cost isn’t the issue.
You get free Starlink on several airlines now, so won't that be a solved problem soon?
Remember that incident where a cop pulled out his taser and tased the suspect? Except he pulled out his pistol and fired it.
The taser looks nothing like a pistol, feels nothing like it, yet it is still possible to confuse the two in the heat of the moment.
No it’s not comparable to a cop that confuses things in the heat of the moment. Not anywhere close to be relatable.
If it was, planes would be crashing down the sky quite often (and it would have been fixed for decades already).
> Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D. Bright
> Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Aeronautical Engineering
> He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system
Location of the switches: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimag...
Here is a video of a takeoff and climb in a 787: https://youtu.be/TTZozTaWiRo
The pilots have no business with their hands in the area of those switches in that phase of the flight (9:30+ in the video). They don't even have to touch the throttle, and even if they did, that's a long way from where you touch the throttle down to the base where those switches are. Which you can't just flip either.
How is that even remotely similar to that cop's situation?
Agreed. The sequence of events also supports this.
I believe one of the pilots made a terrible muscle memory mistake and cutoff the fuel instead of raising the landing gear. This would explain why the landing gear was never raised, why the pilot who was accused of cutting off the fuel denied it (in his mind he had only retracted the landing gear) and why the engines were turned back on after presumably realizing the mistake.
The pilot denies shutting off the fuel, then realises he'd done it accidentally and quietly reenables them hoping there's enough time to save them
¹) https://youtu.be/RbmFmWqqq0c?t=19
²) https://youtu.be/33hG9-BCJVQ?t=5
(I'm not an expert, I just watched these videos)
Hard to believe the other pilot wouldn’t have said anything.
Recovering the airplane and have some people survive the crash are two very different things.
The balance of probability might tend to support that hypothesis. However I'm wondering if it was just something involuntary. My ex for instance who learned to drive on a stick shift would randomly stall the engine after a few weeks driving an automatic.
You’re trying to prove a negative here.
I am not familiar with the 787 operations, but there are a few issues that need to be sorted out first: - altitude when pilots start the after takeoff checklist
- if there are any other switches that are operated in tandem in the general vicinity of where the engine cutoff switches are
- if the cutoff switches had the locking mechanisms present, and if not, if they could be moved inadvertently by the pilot flying hand
Discarding other possibilities in an investigation can have adverse consequences.
Did you ever always push the right buttons every time?
This is what I am debating.
There are too many variables you need to account for.
For example, I want an expert opinion about the tone in the cockpit when the other pilot said “No, I did not touch it” or what was said. Is it calm? Surprised? Cold?
A whole world full of 787’s is pushing the right buttons every single day. If we’re talking about accidentally pressing buttons it seems we’d have seen incidents before.
Well, of course I talk about an accidental touch of the wrong buttons.
Flying is very safe, but at the same time, you will never know how many near misses happen daily that don't become accidents.
Or more precisely, the signals which come from them were found to behave as such.
Without any audible record of turning the switches off, I wouldn't blame the pilots without first checking the wiring and switches themselves for faults. This reminds me of the glitches caused by tin whiskers.
It's not a direct quote or transcript, it's reported speech.
From what I understand, the relight procedure involves cycling these back to CUTOFF and then to RUN anyway. So it is not clear if they were mechanically moved from RUN to CUTOFF preceding the loss of thrust, or cycled during relight.
In this case, it may be a moot distinction, particularly if no physical evidence of fault or tampering has been discovered in investigation. But, in theory, very important - there's a lot of potential grey-area between the two statements.
The proximity of the incident to the ground may also increase the possible attack vectors for simple remote triggers.
As an analogy, if you have a smart lock, you can remotely trigger the _effect_ of turning the key using (let's say a bluetooth control), but if a key is inserted into the keyhole, unless there is two-way mechanical linkage, that key _will not turn_.
Is it possible it could have been an accident or a mistake by one of the pilots? How intention-proofed are engine cutoffs?
I'd liken it to turning off the ignition by turning the key while driving your car. Possibly something that could happen if you're really fatigued, but requires quite a mental lapse.
That is, is it possible they flipped the switches over to RUN but did not seat the switches properly, and instead leaving them on top of the notch, with later vibration causing the switches to disengage?
Just trying to think of some semi-plausible non-active causes.
08:08:35 Vr
08:08:39 Liftoff
08:08:42 Engine 1 cut-off
08:08:42 Engine 2 cut-off
08:08:47 minimum idel speed reached
?? One pilot to other: why cut-off. Other: Did not do it
08:08:52 Engine 1 run
08:08:52 Engine 2 run
1 second to switch them both off and then 4 seconds to switch them both on. No one admitted to switch them off. They are probably going with fine comb over the audio and also the remains of the chared switches.
Looks like the engines react very quickly to cut-off so it is not clear whether the question about the cut-off is prompted by a glance to the switches or the feel of the airplane.
The big question is whether the switches were moved or something made it seem as if the switches were moved.
The workload is pretty high during the takeoff phase. The engines react right away when fuel flow is stopped. The engine displays can have some lag before data is updated.
Relighting an engine at low speed is not feasible - most need 230-250kts IAS before attempting the operation. Maybe you could do it if the APU was still running and could provide compressed air, but it takes about 20-30 seconds to start up amd then probably 5-10 more to spool up to full thrust. I am speculating here a bit, but the pilot did not have enough time to save the plane even if he did everyting right and as fast as humanly possible.
All this aside is overshadowed by the limited amount of time the pilot flying (I would assume the captain in this case since there was only one ATPL pilot in the cockpit) had to troubleshoot the issue of a dual engine failure - as this is what would have felt to him - during takeoff.
The report states the FO was pilot flying.
It's not a rational decision, so there's no reason to expect rational decision making or explanation on the output.
You can do them both with one hand.
joey: Can you switch them quickly?
snypher: You can do them with one hand. [Ed. This is ambiguous and could be read as "one hand, simultaneously". In fact, doing it with one hand non-simultaneously would be a weird claim to make of a simple knob. See also ajb's comment below.]
zihotki: Really? They are not close together and have a spring mechanism. [Ed. Seems to believe snypher is claiming simultaneous operation.]
snypher: I am confused by the response.
Me: [Tries to facilitate clarification]
Not within the context of the thread.
That said Boeing could take a page out of the Garmin GI275. When power is removed it pops up a "60s to shutdown dialog" that you can cancel. Even if you accidentally press SHUTDOWN it only switches to a 10s countdown with a "CANCEL" button.
They could insert a delay if weight on wheels is off. First engine can shutdown when commanded but second engine goes on 60s delay with EICAS warning countdown. Or just always insert a delay unless the fire handle is pulled.
Still... that has its own set of risks and failure modes to consider.
But I'm an advocate of KISS. At a certain point you have to trust the pilot is not going to something extremely stupid/suicidal. Making overly complex systems to try to protect pilots from themselves leads to even worse issues, such as the faulty software in the Boeing 737-MAX.
I wonder if there have been cases where a pilot had to cut fuel before the computer could detect anything abnormal? I do realize that defining "abnormal" is the hardest part of this algorithm.
As a software engineer myself I think it's interesting that we feel software is the true solution when we wouldn't accept that solution ourselves. For example typically in a company you do code reviews and have a release gating process but also there's some exception process for quickly committing code or making adjustments when theres an outage or something. Could you imagine if the system said "hey we aren't detecting an outage, you sure about that? why don't you go take a walk and get a coffee, if you still think there's an outage in 15 minutes from now we will let you make that critical change".
In safety-critical engineering, you generally either automate things fully (i.e. to exceed human capabilities in all situations, not just most), or you keep them manual. Half-measures of automation kill people.
warn then shut offOverride warning time by toggling again.
You don't have to like that culture and you also don't have to participate in it. Making a throwaway account to complain about it is not eusocial behaviour, however. If you know something to be wrong with someone else's reasoning, the expected response is to highlight the flaw.
If someone is speculating about how such a problem might be solved while not trying to conceal their lack of direct experience, I'm fine with it, but not everyone is.
If someone is accusing the designers of being idiots, with the fix "obvious" because reasons, well, yeah, that's unhelpful.
This is not "reasoning from first principles". In fact, I don't think there is any reasoning in the comment.
There is an implication that an obvious solution exists, and then a brief description of said solution.
I am all for speculation and reasoning outside of one's domain, but not low quality commentary like "ugh can't you just do what garmin did".
This is not a throwaway, I'm a lurker, but was compelled to comment. IMHO HN is not the place for "throwaway" ad hominems.
It literally is. Accidental/malicious activation can be catastrophic, therefore it must be guarded against. First principles.
The shutoff timer screen given as an example is a valid way of accomplishing it. Not directly applicable to aircraft, but that's not the point.
> "ugh can't you just do what garmin did"
That's your dishonest interpretation of a post that offers reasonable, relevant suggestions. Don't tell me I need to start quoting that post to prove so. It's right there.
All the controls would be on a giant touchscreen, with the fuel switches behind a hamburger button (that responded poorly and erratically to touch gestures). Even a suicidal pilot wouldn't be able to activate it.
There's 0 reason to conclude murder-suicide, there's an infinitude of things that could have the same result, and both pilots denied it to eachother: how is that presented as proof?
I hope I don't need to explain why the fact no one knew in advance the Las Vegas shooter was going to shoot has ~0 similarities with the situation as we know it, and banal similarities with every murder.
Doesn’t mean the ones where you cannot determine the reason and have to speculate don’t suck.
This kind of attitude gets innocent people behind bars for life. Disgusting.
It's difficult to conclude anything until the investigation is finished and I hope the ones who are carrying it out are as levelheaded, neutral and professional as possible.
So we don't know the exact words used. Did he say for example, "Why did you move the switches to cutoff" or did he ask "Why did you cut off the engines"? If there are indeed two shorts (astronomically low as those probabilities are), the other pilot would say "I didn't", look around confused and then (possibly?) flip both of them down and back up? Which could explain the 4s delay in pulling them back up.
Speculation, but since we do not have actual transcripts or recordings, all I'm doing is answering speculation with more speculation.
For instance, you might deliberately kill yourself by driving your car really fast into something solid, but you probably wouldn't try to do that while backing out of the garage.
The idea is to notify for crucial settings, replace vocal confirmation (probably) already in the SOP anyway, reducing mistakes in bad faith or otherwise.
Don't some planes already have an automated announcement for seatbelts on?
Only reason I can think of why it's not there yet is the cost (whether $$$ or design opportunity) of cramming that in the already-cramped cockpit.
Some problems that immediately come to mind:
- For which settings is there going to be a voice confirmation? Is their confirmation more important than all the other audio warnings?
- During emergency situations, when pilot workload is high, will these only add to that workload, making the emergency even worse?
- Will the pilots get so used to hearing these every day that their brains will simply tune them out as background noise?
Really though, if a pilot wishes to doom an aircraft, there's 1000 different ways they could do so. The solution to this problem likely lies in the pilot mental health management department, rather than the fuel cut off switch audio warning one.
This sounds to me like an electronics issue - an intermittent, inadvertent state transition likely due to some PCB component malfunction
It’s worth noting that Premeditation or “intention” doesn’t have to factor into this.
Studies of survivors of impulse suicides (jumping off of bridges etc) indicate that many of them report having no previous suicidal ideation, no intention or plan to commit suicide, and in many cases no reported depression or difficulties that might encourage suicide.
Dark impulses exist and they don’t always get caught in time by the supervisory conscious process. Most people have experienced this in its more innocuous forms, the call of the void and whatnot, but many have also been witness to thoughtless destructive acts that defy reason and leave the perpetrator confused and in denial.
How so? It is just as likely to be an intermitted electronic malfunction.
I mean, it's not impossible, but it sure the hell is improbable.
You could have made the same assumptions after the first MCAS crash, much like boeing assumed pilot error. It's easy, comforting and sometimes kills people because it makes you stop looking.
The collection of comments on this post remind me it'll just be a brand new set of random guesses until the final report is released. Or worse - the final report reaches no further conclusions and it just has to fade out of interest naturally over time.
If hearing those guesses annoys you, nobody is forcing you to read through comments on a thread of people making them! (I hope - sorry if you are being forced after all.)
The fuel control switches are behind the throttle stalks above the handles to release the engine fire suppression agents. These switches are markedly smaller and have guards on each side protecting them from accidental manipulation. You need to reach behind and twirl your fingers around a bit to reach them. Actuating these switches requires pulling the knob up sufficiently to clear a stop lock before then rotating down. There are two switches that were activated in sequence and in short order.
The pilot monitoring is responsible for raising the gear in response to the pilot flyings' instruction.
I would find it very difficult to believe this was a muscle memory mistake. At the very least, I would want to more evidence supporting such a proposition.
This idea strikes me as even more unlikely than someone shifting their moving vehicle into reverse while intending to activate the window wipers.
I suspect you've never driven an older vehicle with the shifter on the steering column.
Or a new Mercedes ;)
This is obviously an overstatement. Any two regularly performed actions can be confused. Sometimes (when tired or distracted) I've walked into my bathroom intending to shave, but mistakenly brushed my teeth and left. My toothbrush and razor are not similar in function or placement.
The other poster's correction: "it’s like brushing your teeth with razor" is apt. Touching the fuel cutoff switches is not part of any procedure remotely relevant to the takeoff, so there's no trigger present that would prompt the automatic behavior.
More relevantly, you seem to me to be unduly confident about what this pilot's associative triggers might and might not be.
(I'm not strongly arguing against the murder scenario, just against the idea that it's impossible for it to be the confusion scenario.)
https://www.aerosimsolutions.com.au/custom-products/olympus-...
This would be like opening your car door when you meant to activate the turn signal.
Test your mental model against the real world. This is your opportunity.
Same goes for accidental acceleration instead of braking. Two of the same kind of lever right next to each other.
Accidental acceleration while intending to turn on the wipers would be a fitting example, I don't think that happens though.
Given a long enough span of time, every possible fuck up eventually will happen.
This is not what happened here at all. The actions needed to activate the fuel cutoff switches are not similar to any other action a pilot would want to make during takeoff.
If not there should be one as even my simple home wifi camera can record hours of hd video on the small sd card. And If there is, wouldn't that help to instantly identify such things?
I don’t think video is a bad idea. I assume there is a reason why it wasn’t done. Data wise black boxes actually store very little data (maybe a 100mbs), I don’t know if that is due to how old they are, or the requirements of withstanding extremes.
This is exactly how the investigations are NOT conducted. You don't find the evidence that confirms your theory and call it a day when the pieces sorta fit together. You look solely at the evidence and listen to what they tell you leaving aside what you think could have happened.
Instead, it's that because muscle memory allows you to do things without thinking about it, you can get mixed up about which action you meant to perform and go through the whole process without realizing it.
ETA: downthread it is mentioned that these switches are used on the ground to cut the engines
The only difference here is that the consequences are death instead of mere head shaking.
Murder needs more proof than just performing the wrong action. Until then we should apply Hanlon's Razor.
The mistake equivalent to what the pilot supposedly did would be if the pianist accidentally stuck a finger up his nose instead of playing the notes or something.
not all my passwords are up and to the left, some are down and to the right, but when i type the wrong one into the wrong place, i type it accurately, i'm just not supposed to be typing it.
"time to do that thing i've practiced, reach to the left". shuts two engines off by muscle memory.
If that were true, pilots would perform arbitrary motions all the time. Same with car drivers.
Typing something on a keyboard, especially when it's always in the same context, is always essentially the same physical action. The context of a password prompt is the same, the letters on the keyboard feel the same and are right next to each other.
Not comparable to pressing two very different buttons placed far apart, in a context when you'd never ever reach for them.
I remember once writing a cheat sheet for the commands by looking at what my fingers were doing.
It's very hard to solve one problem without creating another. At some point, you just gotta trust the pilot.
Not so much on a Boeing.
- British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. The head flight attendant holds onto his legs to keep him in the plane. The copilot and flight attendant think he is dead, but they keep the situation under control and land the plane.
Everyone survives - including the pilot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGwHWNFdOvg
- United 232: An engine explodes in the tail of an MD-10. Due to rotten luck and weaknesses in the design, it takes out all three of the redundant hydraulic systems, rendering the control surfaces inoperable.
There's a pilot onboard as a passenger who, it just so happens, has read about similar incidents in other aircraft and trained for this scenario on his own initiative. He joins the other pilots in the cockpit and they figure out how to use the engines to establish rudimentary control.
They crash just short of the runway. 112 people die, but 184 people survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7CgWvD-x4
- Pinnacle 3701: Two pilots mess around with an empty plane. They take it up to it's operational ceiling. While they're goofing off, they don't realize they're losing momentum. They try to correct too late and cannot land safely.
In their last moments they decide to sacrifice any chance they have to survive by not deploying their landing gear. They choose to glide for the maximum distance to avoid hitting houses, rather than maximizing how much impact is absorbed. They do hit a house but no one else is killed.
This one is a good illustration of how better design can help prevent accidents or make them less severe.
The error the maintenance people made was that when they replaced the window and the 90 screws that hold it on 84 of the screws they used were were 0.66 mm smaller in diameter than they should have been.
The window on that model plane was fitted from the outside, so the job of the screws was to hold it there against the force of the pressure difference at altitude. The smaller screws were too weak to do that.
If instead the designers of the plane had used plug type windows which are fitted from the inside then the pressure difference at altitude works to hold the window in place. Even with no screws it would be fine at altitude. Instead the job of the screws would be to keep gravity from making the window fall in when the plane is not high enough for the pressure difference to keep it in place.
My vague memory of the Air Emergency episode on this (AKA Air Crash Investigation, Air Disasters, Mayday, and maybe others depending on what country and channel you are watching it on) is that after this accident many aircraft companies switched to mostly using plug windows on new designs.
Most of these things were figured out over 100 years of carefully analysing accidents and near accidents to continuously improve safety.
Surprisingly hard to search for this phrase
This article covers the topic though:
https://www.witpress.com/elibrary/wit-transactions-on-the-bu...
But I did burn out on Mentour Pilot after a while, I just had my fill of tragedy.
At the time we operated some industry specific, but national scale, critical systems and were discussing the balance of the crucial business importance of agility and rapid release cycles (in our industry) against system fragility and reliability.
Turns out (and I take no credit for the underlying architecture of this specific system, though I’ve been a strong advocate for this model of operating) if you design systems around humans who can rapidly identify and diagnose what has failed, and what the up stream and down stream impacts are, and you make these failures predictable in their scope and nature, and the recovery method simple, with a solid technical operations group you can limit the mean-time-to-resolution of incidents to <60s without having to invest significant development effort into software that provides automated system recovery.
The issue with both methods (human or technical recovery) is that both are dependent on maintaining an organizational culture that fosters a deep understanding of how the system fails, and what the various predictable upstream and downstream impacts are. The more you permit the culture to decay the more you increase the likelihood that an outage will go from benign and “normal” to absolutely catastrophic and potentially company ending.
In my experience companies who operate under this model eventually sacrifice the flexibility of rapid deployment for an environment where no failure is acceptable, largely because of an lack of appreciation for how much of the system’s design is dependent on an expectation of the fostering of the “appropriate” human element.
(Which leads to further discussion about absolutely critical systems like aviation or nuclear where you absolutely cannot accept catastrophic failure because it results in loss of life)
Extremely long story short, I completely agree. Aviation (more accurately aerospace) disasters, nuclear disasters, medical failures (typically emergency care or surgical), power generation, and the military (especially aircraft carrier flight decks) are all phenomenal areas to look for examples of how systems can be designed to account for where people may fail in the critical path.
Air Canada 143
- Pilot calculated incorrect fuel due to metric/imperial unit mixup, and ran out of fuel midair.
- Said pilot performed an impossible glider-sideslip maneuver to rapidly bleed airspeed just-in-time for an emergency landing at an abandoned airfield, having to completely rely on eyeballing the approach.
- No fatalties or serious injuries.
There's no real point to considering what happens if the pilot wants to murder people on board. Of course they will succeed....
Still quite early in the investigation, and so many things to consider. I don't know why online communities have been so quick to gravitate towards the murder/suicide theory. I thought aviation enthusiasts of all people would want to keep an open mind until every other possibility is ruled out, however minuscule it might seem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/world/asia/air-india-cras...
>>India's media report that the investigation is NOT focussing on a human action causing the fuel switches to appear in the CUTOFF position, but on a system failure. Service Bulletins by Boeing issued in year 2018 recommending to upgrade the fuel switches to locked versions to prevent inadvertent flip of the switches, as well as the FAA/GE issued Service Bulletin FAA-2021-0273-0013 Attachment 2 relating to loss of control issue (also see above) were NOT implemented by Air India.
I know it's probably not worth the hazmat tradeoff for such a rare event, but the F-16 has an EPU powered by hydrazine that can spool up in about a second.
The 787 and nearly every other commercial aircraft with powered flight controls [1] (fly-by-wire or traditional) has emergency power available via RAT and/or APU, and any fly-by-wire aircraft has batteries to keep the flight control computers running through engine failure to power supply being restored by the RAT and/or APU. Due to its unusually high use of electrical systems, the 787 has particularly large lithium batteries for these cases. There is no need for an additional EPU because the emergency systems already work fine (and did their jobs as expected in this case). You just can't recover from loss of nearly all engine thrust at that phase of takeoff. [2]
1. The notable exceptions to having a RAT for emergency flight controls are the 737 and 747 variants prior to the 747-8. In the 747 case, the four engines would provide sufficient hydraulic power while windmilling in flight and thus no additional RAT would be necessary. The 737 has complete mechanical reversion for critical flight controls, and so can be flown without power of any kind. There is sufficient battery power to keep backup instruments running for beyond the maximum glide time from altitude - at which point the aircraft will have "landed" one way or another.
2. There is only one exception of a certified passenger aircraft with a system for separate emergency thrust. Mexicana briefly operated a special version of the early 727 which would be fitted with rocket assist boosters for use on particularly hot days to ensure that single-engine-out climb performance met certification criteria. Mexicana operated out of particularly "hot and high" airports like Mexico City, which significantly degrade aircraft performance. On the worst summer days, the performance degradation would have been severe enough that the maximum allowable passenger/baggage/fuel load would have been uneconomical without the margin provided by the emergency rockets. I'm not aware of them ever being used on a "real" flight emergency outside of the testing process, and I think any similar design today would face a much higher bar to reach certification.
At least it worked for me on Kerbal Space Program. At least sometimes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_8qCTAjsDg [30s]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT58pzY41wA [15m]
The Cirrus system is deployed by rockets, allowing it to function at a very low altitude. They say that you should deploy it no matter what altitude you are at, and it will add at least some friction. The system has a very impressive track record.
However, at this altitude, with an airplane this heavy, you might have to put the rockets on the plane to decelerate enough to save lives.
Edit: I recently saw an SF50 YT video. It's pretty awesome with the V/X tail.
From the avherald link:
>Service Bulletins by Boeing issued in year 2018 recommending to upgrade the fuel switches to locked versions to prevent inadvertent flip of the switches, as well as the FAA/GE issued Service Bulletin FAA-2021-0273-0013 Attachment 2 relating to loss of control issue (also see above) were NOT implemented by Air India.
Also, such complexity would introduce additional points of failure - as a sister comment mentions, a faulty altimeter (or whatever sensor) could prevent you from cutting off fuel when you need to.
What is on the ground below does not matter at that point - how far above that ground you are is what is important. More altitude is more time.
This flight was less than 200 meters up in the air. Sully's flight that you probably remember, that made a successful emergency landing on the river, was about 860 meters high, giving them much more time - about 3.5 minutes of glide time, vs. 32 seconds in the air, total, for the Air India flight.
Toggling it off presumably requires more power and is multiple actions.
Also, you don't need multiple certifications and 1500 hours of experience to drive a car.
There's no handbrake to pull, and turning the wheel so hard to lose control is next to impossible. Maybe on an oily wet or loose surface.
New designs are prone to ill decision-making from engineers, drivers and pilots alike. Every pathway of let's do it differently is the beginning of a journey of fine-tuning loops until stability.
She was mad and said she has to jam it hard ( going for 5th and missed), but it went into reverse. And the gearbox literally hit the road when she let out the clutch.
There may be a good reason to cut fuel to one engine shortly after takeoff.
You could have a system that prevents both switches being thrown, and only in the specific window after takeoff, but you’ve also now added two additional things that can fail.
This is a rather odd comparison. You can slam the brakes, yank the steering week, and do all sorts of things to intentionally make the car crash.
Commercial airplanes have safeguards against in-flight thrust reverser deployment. That is why they only work in tandem with the ground sensing systems - like the airplane must firmly believe both main landing gears to be physically on the ground for both reversers to be operational.
The danger of a burning engine is irrelevant if you are heading into terrain.
Not quite. When you hit the ground you do not want any fuel leaks or hot surfaces as much as possible. That is why for example engines are shutdown when doing an emergency belly landing, to try abd prevent the airplane from bursting into flames.
Engine failure during takeoff.
Engine fire.
Eventually, yes. Soon? Maybe.
You may or may not reach your destination. Or something like that.
As we just reported, the report says that according to data from the flight recorder both the fuel control switches, which are normally used to switch the engines on or off when on the ground, were moved from the run to the cutoff position shortly after takeoff. This caused both engines to lose thrust.
But there was audio, too, and one pilot asked the other "why did you switch these off" and the second one said "I didn't".
Was there are third one in the jump seat?
https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2025/Preliminary_Report_VT_AN...
This comment stream on HN is not a jury. We don’t have to refrain from making judgments right now about what happened. There is nothing wrong with rational people reaching a preliminary conclusion based on available evidence.
Rational people should also remain open to revising their judgments/conclusions if new information becomes available.
And we shouldn’t demand any specific consequences for anyone absent a trial.
My understanding is these switches are used routinely during the shutdown procedure or did I get that wrong?
And this can't possibly be all the audio if the other pilot noticed the switch position, I would expect a lot more cussing and struggle.
So they didn't notice the switch position? The switch was in the right position but not really? Is this a rarely used switch that one might not look at (or know where to look) during regular use?
10 seconds between OFF and ON.
It only takes a few seconds to completely screw everyone, but a bit longer for the consequences to occur.
The report says the black box reports the fuel cutoff switches being activated. That doesn't necessarily mean that either of the two pilots activated them, it just means that the fly-by-wire system reacted to a fuel cutoff event.
"The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cutoff.
In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff.
The other pilot responded that he did not do so."
It does:
1. Those switches have physical interlocks and cannot be manipulated by any computer system.
2. The flight data recorder is measuring the position of the switches; they aren't inferring the position from some system state. There's a "position of this switch" channel.
The switches were physically moved in the cockpit, that's basically ground truth. The question now is who and why.
https://simpleflying.com/boeing-787-technical-features-guide...
" Advanced electric controls
The 787 entered service with an improved fly-by-wire flight control system. Rather than mechanical processes, the systems convert flight deck crew inputs into electrical signals. Still, there were additional advancements with the type."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...
787 (Dreamliner) was pushing hard for weight reduction, and it would not surprise me at all if the switch output fed a digital computer input rather than routing directly to the fuel shutoff valves, but I don't have any direct knowledge of this.
I think you have to really reach to make this not pilot error. I know it’s appealing to call this a Boeing problem, but the evidence just from this prelim report is very compelling.
If you think it’s not pilot error, you can make some fake Manifold dollars: https://manifold.markets/JohnHughes/what-will-be-the-officia...
The fact that your car's engine stops doesn't mean you turned the ignition switch off. Anyone who has had to troubleshoot a car with intermitent electrical faults knows that.
The switches physically moved, and there is no motor to actuate them without physical intervention.
Even taking intent for granted, to deny suicide in a case like this would be to suppose that the person responsible expected to survive while everyone else died. What could possibly support that conclusion?
> This was not suicide, or murder-suicide; it was one of the most horrific mass murders in history, in which the guy that did it happened to lose his life in the process.
Why wouldn’t this qualify as a murder-suicide, assuming your theory is correct?
It feels qualitatively different than someone pointing a gun at someone else and then themselves, which is usually what pops to mind when you hear “murder-suicide”.
You’re correct though, it qualifies.
So I can't imagine how it could have been done accidentally.
This implies intent.
> One pilot asked “why did you turn them off?” and the other said “I didn’t.”
To me this reads like an unintentional error with colossol implications.
Are you suggesting there was malicious intent and then a delibrately crafted denial by the perpetrator?
Pilots are drilled from day one that the fuel switches are sacred. After a few accidents where one engine failed and the pilot accidentally turned off the remaining functional engine, the training was overhauled so that it would be impossible for it to be an easy action done by mistake. One pilot is required to ask the other for confirmation before toggling the switch, I believe. It wouldn’t be something you’d do from muscle memory.
It easy to say that when you know there's likely no way to prove or disprove whether it as an accident or not. Unless a pilot left a note stating his future intentions, there's no way to determine their state of mind.
If there was no mechanical failure, the only remaining possibility is deliberate action. And if it was mechanical failure, we’d see an emergency air worthiness directive being issued, which we haven’t.
Honestly I think the chances are good that you're right, but the way you're presenting it as absolutely certain strikes me as overconfident, borderline arrogant.
Also, what's with the whole "staking your reputation" thing? What reputation? Are you some kind of famous journalist? Is there some reason we should care about you "covering live news" ? Serious questions -- I personally have no idea who you are.
I also don't recognize this guy's name, but I do find it ironic that his profile is possibly the most well-linked to a other identities I've ever seen on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sillysaurusx
It’s mostly a very public "If I’m wrong, I won’t ever do this again." I’ve been writing informative HN comments since 2008 on various accounts. It’s a big deal to me not to spread misinformation or be mistaken in a situation like this.
The victims also deserve to be acknowledged. At this point the overwhelming body of evidence points to a deliberate act. Pilots are trained never to touch the fuel switches in flight, and (I believe) there is a verbal confirmation required before toggling. This captain had over 8,000 hours.
The reason I’m so confident is because I trust the system. It’s designed so that if either of the two pilots do anything, they verbally call it out, e.g. "gear up." A callout like that followed by fuel switch cutoff would indicate it was accidental. But as far as I know, there was no callout.
The pilot flying is also the one who asks for gear up and such. It’s the job do the pilot monitoring to perform those actions.
Suppose it was accidental. That would mean the pilot flying was fiddling with switches instead of flying; that’s against SOP. Or it would mean the pilot monitoring was performing uncommanded actions, which is also against SOP. It’s not something that happens on a whim. Both are contradictions, hence, no accident.
As for being overconfident or arrogant, what matters to me is accuracy, and passing along that accuracy. No one seemed to be willing to publicly call this a malicious action, so I did. If I’m wrong, you can be sure I’ll feel terrible for weeks, post an apology in the thread that shows I was wrong, and then bow out in disgrace, never to cover news again.
People here did the same thing when the common belief was that there was a non-zero chance of nuclear war. I was one of the few voices in that thread saying absolutely not, stop stressing yourself out for no reason.
I’m simply one voice of many. As always, it’s up to the reader to decide what to believe.
Then why not either wait until there's more information or temper your remarks by acknowledging there's still ambiguity? That would directly hedge against spreading misinformation, whereas staking your reputation on it and then shutting up if you're wrong only works after the misinformation has spread and doesn't seem very productive.
I think the right response to realizing you've spread misinformation (in the event that you turn out to be mistaken [I think it's 60-40 in favor of deliberate]) is to temper your statements and rededicate yourself to checking the facts, not removing yourself from the discussion altogether. And if you were keeping your mouth shut, wouldn't you continue to see discussions you could meaningfully contribute to, and after a while wouldn't you wonder whether anyone was really benefitting from your silence?
I understand that you appear earnest. However, your history of multi-accounting on this site makes your promise to never post on a given topic again meaningless to me, because I have no expectation that you wouldn’t continue to post about it on other accounts that we don’t know about at this time, possibly because they haven’t even been created yet.
I'm also interested in the earlier switch defects where the switches were installed with the locking mechanism disengaged on some 737s and inspection was advised for 787, but the incident aircraft was not inspected.
The airworthiness directive for that [1] indicates switches with locking disengaged should be replaced, but I wonder if it's possible to reingage the locking somehow, which could result in a situation where the locking wasn't engaged, the switches changed inadverdently and then when restored the run position the lock was engaged... that's a big reach, of course.
All that said, assuming the switch was working as designed, there's a semantic argument around deliberate and intentional. If the switch requires specific action, it's fair to call it deliberate action; but if the switcher thought they were activating a different switch, it's not murder.
Either way, there's no sense rushing to a conclusion of murder. Assuming one of the pilots activated the switch, they have already died and they are beyond the effects of human judgement; so we may as well wait for further information.
[1] https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/NM-18-33.pdf/SIB_NM-18-33_1
It's quite possible it's a "performed the wrong muscle memory at the worst possible moment" type of accident. This is unlikely, but anyone who thinks such a mistake is impossible doesn't know anything about human factors.
Unlikely just means "low probability." There are thousands of flights per day, so it's only a matter of time.
If he was trying to do something else, he would have called it out. E.g. an audible “gear up.”
In my view it would be quite hard to move them by accident, and probably not possible to move at once.
It would be interesting to know if the plane has any other switches of the same type, that are routinely activated.
And, it's _two_ switches.
I take your point that we should always be suspicious of complicated, digital buses, and this is not the final report, so there’s still plenty of time to uncover weirdness. However, if the flight date reporter shows the switch being thrown, and then a few milliseconds later, shows the valve starting to close, and the same sequence happening shortly there after on the second switch and valve, I feel this would really limit the likelihood of any digital shenanigans.
Dudes is extremely lucky or the character from Unbreakable.
Right after takeoff at low altitude is basically the worst place for this to happen. Speed and altitude are low so gliding is going to be a short distance and happen quickly.
If there had been a perfect empty long flat grass field in that location it may have been salvageable, but also right after takeoff the plane usually has a heavy fuel load which makes for a much riskier landing.
Edit: This article has a map showing the glide path:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/12/air-india-flig...
Yes of course the plane glided once the engines stopped, producing thrust, just like all planes do. But just like all planes, and all gliders, gliding means trading altitude for velocity - giving up precious height every second in order to maintain flight. At that stage in the flight, they just didn’t have enough to give. If the same thing had happened at 30,000 feet, it would be a non-event. They would glide down a few thousand feet as the engines spool back up and once they return to full power, everything will be back to normal. Or if for some reason, the engines were permanently cooked, you’d have maybe 20 to 30 minutes of glide time so you’ve got a lot of time to look around and find a flat spot. But you just don’t have enough time for all that to happen When you’re a few hundred feet off the ground.
Engine failure shortly after takeoff is a major cause of fatal accidents.