Air India Flight 171

Based on Wikipedia: Air India Flight 171

Thirty-two seconds. That's how long Air India Flight 171 was in the air before it fell from the sky and crashed into a medical college in Ahmedabad, India. In those thirty-two seconds, something happened in the cockpit that investigators are still trying to understand—something that caused both engines to lose power almost immediately after takeoff, killing 260 people and leaving only a single survivor.

This was no ordinary aviation disaster. It was the first fatal crash of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in the fourteen years since that aircraft type entered service. And when investigators recovered the flight recorder and downloaded its data, what they found only deepened the mystery.

The Morning of June 12, 2025

The flight was routine, at least on paper. A Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, registered as VT-ANB, was scheduled to carry 230 passengers and 12 crew members from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick. The aircraft was eleven years old, delivered to Air India in January 2014, with nearly 42,000 hours on its airframe. Both of its General Electric GEnx engines had been installed just three months earlier.

At the controls were two experienced pilots. Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, fifty-six years old, had logged approximately 15,600 flight hours, including 8,600 on the 787. First Officer Clive Kunder, thirty-two, had around 3,400 hours total, with 1,100 on the Dreamliner. Kunder was the "pilot flying" that day—the one actually manipulating the controls—while Sabharwal served as the "pilot monitoring," overseeing instruments and communications.

The weather was cooperative. Winds were light at just six knots, visibility stretched to six kilometers, and there was no significant cloud cover. The aircraft was cleared for a full-length takeoff on runway 23.

At 1:38 in the afternoon local time, after a sixty-two-second takeoff roll, the 787 lifted off. It would never land.

The Fatal Thirty-Two Seconds

What happened next unfolded with terrifying speed.

Three seconds after the wheels left the ground, as the aircraft accelerated to 180 knots—about 210 miles per hour—something catastrophic occurred. Both fuel control switches moved from their normal RUN position to CUTOFF. One switch moved first. A second later, the other followed.

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what these switches do. On a Boeing 787, the fuel control switches are located on the throttle control module, positioned just below the throttle levers themselves. Moving a switch to CUTOFF does exactly what it sounds like: it immediately stops all fuel flow to that engine. Without fuel, a jet engine produces no thrust. It also stops generating the electrical and hydraulic power it normally supplies to the aircraft.

These switches exist for emergencies. If an engine catches fire, pilots need to shut it down immediately. If an engine malfunctions severely, they might need to restart it, which requires first cutting off the fuel and then restoring it. Under normal circumstances, these switches are only used on the ground, during engine startup and shutdown procedures.

To prevent accidental activation—because the consequences of moving these switches in flight are so severe—Boeing designed multiple safeguards. Each switch has a metal stop-lock mechanism that requires the switch to be physically pulled upward before it can be moved sideways. Brackets on either side of the switches guard them against unintentional contact.

Yet somehow, on Flight 171, both switches moved to CUTOFF within seconds of takeoff.

A Plane Without Power

The moment both engines lost fuel, the aircraft began to die. Not immediately—physics doesn't work that way. A jet engine is essentially a massive spinning turbine, and it takes time for all that rotating mass to spool down. But thrust dropped precipitously, and with it, the aircraft's ability to climb.

Five seconds after the first switch moved, an emergency system kicked in automatically. This was the ram air turbine, or RAT—a small propeller that deploys from the aircraft's belly and spins in the rushing airstream, generating just enough hydraulic pressure and electricity to keep essential flight controls working. The RAT is a last resort, designed to give pilots a chance to save the aircraft when primary power is lost.

Then something strange happened. About ten seconds after moving to CUTOFF, the first fuel control switch returned to RUN. Four seconds later, the second switch did the same. The engines' computerized control systems—called Full Authority Digital Engine Control, or FADEC—detected the restored fuel flow and automatically attempted to restart both engines.

The cockpit voice recorder captured one pilot asking the other why he had "cut off." The other pilot responded that he "did not." The preliminary investigation report did not specify which pilot said which.

By now, the aircraft had stopped climbing. Airport surveillance cameras captured it taking off, rising briefly, then beginning a gradual descent. An aviation enthusiast filming from about two hundred meters outside the airport perimeter caught the final moments on video. He later told reporters that the plane was behaving strangely, wobbling from side to side, its tail appearing to "sag more deeply beneath its nose" as it descended.

Impact

The first thing the aircraft struck was a tree. Then the tail hit the top of the campus mess hall at B.J. Medical College, part of the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital complex located just 1.7 kilometers from the runway's end. The aircraft's empennage—its tail section—ripped away from the fuselage.

What followed was a cascade of destruction. The aircraft continued breaking apart as it collided with building after building. Pieces of the flight deck came to rest approximately two hundred meters from where the tail had first struck. The wreckage field stretched three hundred meters long and one hundred twenty meters wide. Five buildings suffered severe damage from impact and the fires that followed.

Nine seconds after the fuel switches returned to RUN, one of the pilots transmitted a mayday call, reporting loss of thrust. An air traffic controller asked for the flight's call sign. There was no response.

The recordings ended six seconds after that mayday call. At impact, one engine had actually relit and was beginning to spool up, generating some power. The second engine had also relit, but its core speed was still falling even as its computer poured in additional fuel, desperately trying to recover thrust.

It was too late. Thirty-two seconds after takeoff, Flight 171 ceased to exist as an aircraft.

The Sole Survivor

Of the 242 people aboard, 241 died. The lone survivor was Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a forty-year-old British citizen who had been seated in row 11, seat A—right next to an emergency exit.

Ramesh's account of his survival is remarkable. The section of the aircraft where he sat somehow detached and came to rest on the ground floor of the hostel building. The emergency exit beside him broke open during the crash, creating an opening through which he escaped. Video footage captured him walking away from the wreckage before being led to an ambulance.

His injuries were relatively minor: facial cuts and burns to his left hand. He was discharged from the hospital after five days. Six days after the crash, he attended the funeral of his brother, who had also been aboard Flight 171 but did not survive. Ramesh subsequently developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

On the ground, nineteen people were killed and sixty-seven seriously injured. The crash occurred in a densely populated area—a medical college hostel where students lived and worked. At least fifty medical students required hospitalization. The dean of the college reported that most students had escaped, but ten or twelve had been trapped in the resulting fire.

The Investigation and Its Troubling Questions

India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, or AAIB, took the lead on the investigation, assisted by teams from the United Kingdom's Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the United States National Transportation Safety Board. General Electric, which manufactured the engines, sent its own team to analyze cockpit data.

The first of the aircraft's two "enhanced airborne flight recorders" was recovered from the mess hall rooftop the day after the crash. These devices are more advanced than traditional flight recorders, combining the functions of both a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder into a single unit. The second recorder was found in the crash debris three days later, though it was substantially damaged and its data could not be recovered through normal methods.

The preliminary report, released exactly one month after the crash, established the basic sequence of events but raised more questions than it answered. The fuel control switches had clearly moved to CUTOFF, causing the engines to lose power. They had then returned to RUN, and the engines had begun to restart—but too late to prevent the crash.

What the report did not explain was why the switches moved in the first place.

The report noted that in 2018, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin warning that fuel switches similar to those on the 787 had been installed on Boeing 737 aircraft with their stop-lock mechanisms disengaged. Air India acknowledged it had not performed the recommended inspections because they were not mandatory.

The aircraft's maintenance records showed that its throttle control module had been replaced twice—in 2019 and 2023—for reasons unrelated to the fuel switches. No fuel switch defects had been reported since then. The throttle levers were found in the idle position when recovered, but flight recorder data showed they had been kept at takeoff thrust until impact. The flaps were properly set for takeoff.

The report identified no mechanical faults and made no safety recommendations.

A Darker Possibility

In late November 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that tensions had emerged between American and Indian investigators. The source of the friction: American government and industry officials had come to believe that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal had deliberately crashed the aircraft.

This allegation—that Flight 171 was not an accident but a murder-suicide—places the disaster in an awful category of aviation tragedies. The most infamous precedent is Germanwings Flight 9525, which crashed in the French Alps in 2015 after the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately flew the aircraft into a mountainside, killing all 150 people aboard.

The evidence, as publicly known, is circumstantial but unsettling. The fuel control switches moved to CUTOFF at precisely the worst possible moment—seconds after takeoff, when the aircraft was too low and too slow to recover. The switches then returned to RUN, as if someone had changed their mind or as if another person in the cockpit had intervened. The cockpit voice recording captured one pilot accusing the other of cutting off the engines, and the other denying it.

But no official conclusion has been announced. The investigation remains ongoing, and the full truth may not emerge for years.

The Response

The scale of the emergency response matched the scale of the disaster. The first call to fire and emergency services came at 1:45 in the afternoon, six minutes after the crash. Two firefighter teams were dispatched immediately, and a "brigade call" went out—an all-hands mobilization. More than three hundred firefighters, sixty fire vehicles, and twenty water tankers converged on the site. Teams came from across Gujarat, from Vadodara, Gandhinagar, and GIFT City, along with resources from the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and Civil Defence.

The Indian Army, Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force, National Disaster Response Force, and Western Railways all deployed personnel. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation sent more than 150 vehicles—earthmovers, excavators, trucks—to clear debris. All roads to the crash site were closed. A military hospital was placed on standby. Flight operations at Ahmedabad Airport were suspended before resuming later in limited capacity.

The post-crash fires burned at an estimated 1,500 degrees Celsius—hot enough to melt aluminum, hot enough to make victim identification extraordinarily difficult. Yet by June 28, just over two weeks after the crash, the remains of all 260 victims had been identified, primarily through DNA analysis. Among the dead was Vijay Rupani, who had served as Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2016 to 2021.

A First for the Dreamliner

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner entered commercial service in 2011, and for fourteen years it had maintained a perfect safety record. No passenger had ever died in a 787 crash. No 787 had ever been destroyed in an accident.

Flight 171 ended both streaks. It became not only the first fatal accident involving a 787 but also what's known in aviation as a "hull loss"—the total destruction of an aircraft. It was also the deadliest plane crash of the 2020s, surpassing Jeju Air Flight 2216.

The 787 had not been without problems. Early in its service life, the aircraft suffered from issues with its lithium-ion batteries, which overheated and, in some cases, caught fire. The entire 787 fleet was grounded for several months in 2013 while Boeing redesigned the battery systems. There were also production quality issues that led to delivery delays and inspections.

But these problems had never resulted in a fatal crash. The 787's composite airframe, advanced aerodynamics, and fuel-efficient engines had made it one of the most successful widebody aircraft in aviation history. Airlines around the world operated hundreds of them on long-haul routes.

Flight 171 changed the aircraft's legacy in an instant.

What Comes Next

Following the crash, India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation ordered additional pre-departure technical inspections for Air India's entire Boeing 787 fleet. The airline was directed to execute additional maintenance and inspections covering fuel-parameter monitoring systems, cabin air compressor systems, electronic engine control system tests, engine fuel actuator operational tests, and oil-system checks for all its 787-8 and 787-9 aircraft.

Air India chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran told the airline's seven hundred staff that the crash was "the most heartbreaking one, which I thought I would never see." He said the incident should serve "as a driving force to create a safer airline." CEO Campbell Wilson, who had been on a flight from Delhi to Paris when news of the crash broke, turned his aircraft around to return to India and assist with the crisis response.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the crash site the day after the disaster, meeting with the lone survivor and those injured on the ground. In the United Kingdom, where fifty-three of the passengers had been citizens, Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed condolences and the Foreign Office established crisis teams. King Charles III requested that senior royals wear black armbands and observe a minute of silence at the Trooping the Colour ceremony two days after the crash.

The Weight of Uncertainty

Aviation accidents are investigated with extraordinary rigor precisely because the stakes are so high. When a plane crashes, investigators reconstruct every moment of the flight, examine every component of the wreckage, and interview every possible witness. The goal is not just to determine what happened, but to prevent it from ever happening again.

Flight 171 presents investigators with a puzzle that may not have a satisfying answer. If the fuel switches moved due to a mechanical failure or design flaw, that flaw must be identified and corrected across every 787 in service. If the switches moved because of deliberate human action, the aviation industry must grapple once again with the terrible reality that cockpit doors designed to keep terrorists out also keep help from getting in.

The cockpit voice recording captured a moment of confusion or accusation—one pilot asking the other why he had cut off the engines, the other denying it. Was this the sound of two pilots trying to understand a mechanical failure? Or was it something darker?

For the families of the 260 people who died, and for Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the man who somehow walked away from the wreckage, the answer matters deeply. For the aviation industry, it matters too—but perhaps in different ways.

Thirty-two seconds is not much time. It's barely enough to register that something has gone wrong, let alone to fix it. Whatever happened aboard Flight 171, it happened too fast for anyone to stop it. And understanding why may be the only way to ensure it never happens again.