Hmmm, Chinese aviation, who are refusing to release the report into the China Eastern crash due to “national security concerns” 
There are limited options here, either it was:
- Pilot error
- Mechanical failure
- Faulty maintenance/fuelling
- Environmental e.g. weather, bird strike
- Sabotage
And I don’t think the aviation community or victim’s families will tolerate a cosy cover-up just to protect Boeing.
They won’t necessarily know. And the degree of grief won’t necessarily change depending on what fault is assigned. And generous compensation has a way of silencing families.
A cover-up will be hard, but not impossible. Just given the cozyness of Trump and Modi, I just wouldn’t rule anything out just yet.
Interesting discussion about latest “updates” by Mentour Pilot;
Clickbait just repeating unfounded internet rumours.
I dunno, it is smelling more and more like some “dark diplomacy” is at play.
This is not an AF 447 or MH 370 with hours of a data.. it was 2 minute flight, and insufficient thrust was almost certainly a factor, due to one of the reasons castro mentioned above.
That they can’t present a finding until now is getting more suspect by the day.
They literally said that it came from reputable aviation journalists, which is why they decided to talk about it.
Shall we wait untilthe report is released?
The Indian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) submitted its preliminary report on 8 July, so a public summary should be released soon. Here’s hoping there is no political chicanery and we will get the full, unvarnished truth of what they’ve found out so far.
Ooh, sorry for sharing something I thought people might find interesting.
I look forward to it, because determining if human error was a factor should be straight-forward:
If no control manipulation was conducted that could induce loss of thrust at the time thrust was lost, then human error can be eliminated. ple Faulty fuel switch may be the the “softest” technical blame…a simple and unfortunate defect, rather than an inherent design flaw as with the 737MAX. Both plane builder and crew (posthumously) save face.
Boeing won’t be off the hook if that’s the cause, no single-point failure should be able to shut down both engines.
Apparently the report has just been released
" 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.
It says that in the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why he “did the cutoff”. The other pilot, it says, responded that he did not do so.
It is not specified which voice is which. At the time the aircraft took off, the co-pilot was flying the plane, while the captain was monitoring.
The switches were then moved back into their normal inflight position, something which would automatically start the process of relighting the engines.
One engine, according to the report, was in the process of regaining thrust at the time the aircraft crashed. The other was relit but was not yet regaining thrust."
It is impossible for those switches to move accidentally. So if one pilot asks why the other moved them, and he denies doing so, well that is highly suspicious.
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Holy moly. This raises even more questions.
I’ll admit I probably have a bias in support of the pilots, it’s hard to believe that either of them would have deliberately cut off the fuel or mistaken those switches for anything else during the take-off checklist. These were two experienced aviators, with the first officer just 400 hours short of qualifying as a captain.
At this point, I see two plausible explanations:
- Mental health or sabotage
- Sheer incompetence
And for the conspiracy theorists, there’s always:
- A political cover-up, possibly instigated by the White House to protect Boeing. Given the closeness between Trump and Modi, it’s not a stretch to imagine Trump asking for (or Modi offering) such a favour. Over the past six months, international law, the rules-based order and established norms have all been systematically trashed… so why should this be any different?
Preliminary reports only establish the facts. Not why they happened.
The data recorder only recorded the switch changing to off position but it does not determine the change being commanded or not. This requires the long investigation.
Anyway, it’s interesting that the fuel supply could be interrupted at such critical flight phase and so easily.
If the core of the preliminary report is to be believed, then the switches were deliberately moved. These aren’t ordinary toggle switches, they require the user to pull up past a detent and then push down to cut off fuel. You could drop a laptop on them and they wouldn’t budge. That’s by design, to prevent accidental activation.
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It’s hard to believe a pilot would fly their aircraft deliberately into the ground also (Germanwings) or fly it in stealth mode until it ran out of fuel (Malaysian) but here we are.
At the risk of being accused of posting clickbait. If anyone is interested, Petter and Ben (737 training captains) of Mentour Now go through the whole report.
Or another alternative …
"But investigators are also zeroing in on what they describe is an interesting point in the report.
It says in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB) highlighting that some Boeing 737 fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.
While the issue was noted, it wasn’t deemed an unsafe condition requiring an Airworthiness Directive (AD) - a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions in a product.
The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB which crashed. As the SAIB was advisory, Air India did not perform the recommended inspections."
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If you watch the video I posted, the captains say this almost certainly didn’t have anything to do with it, although don’t rule it out 100%