‘In your hands’: Exchange moments before Air India crash

Sources familiar with the Air India investigation have claimed the captain made a critical statement seconds before the flight crashed killing 260 people.

The captain of the doomed Air India flight that killed more than 200 people last month, gave control of the plane to his first officer before takeoff, according to sources citing cockpit recordings from the recovered black boxes.

Initial findings from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) reported that fuel control switches to the engines were moved from the "run" to the "cut-off" position moments before impact.

It also included an exchange in which one of the pilots asked the other why the fuel switches had been moved, without identifying the speakers.

Two sources familiar with the matter claim that earlier in the recording, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal told First Officer Clive Kunder, “the plane is in your hands,” Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reports.

It isn’t unusual for a First Officer to fly the plane at various points, including take off.

But US pilots who have read the initial findings from the AAIB into the crash were cited in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday as saying Mr Kunder would likely have had his hands full flying the plane when the fuel switches were turned off.

That meant Captain Sabharwal, who was monitoring, would be more likely to have moved the switches.

Fuel control switches to the engines of an Air India flight that crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 260 people, were moved from the "run" to the "cut-off" position moments before impact, a preliminary investigation report has said. Picture: CENTRAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY FORCE (CISF) / AFP

Captain Sabharwal was a veteran in the industry while Mr Kunder was in his early thirties and still building his career.

Air India flight 171 bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, crashed in Ahmedabad just 30 seconds into the flight, killing all but one of the 242 people on board and an additional 19 on the ground.

India’s aviation regulator ordered the country’s airlines this week to investigate the locking feature on the fuel control switches of several Boeing models.

Air India’s inspection of the locking feature on the switches of its existing Boeing 787 aircraft found no issues, an internal communication circulated within the airline said.

The order to investigate came after Boeing notified operators that the fuel switch locks on its jets were safe.

“Over the weekend, our engineering team initiated precautionary inspections on the locking mechanism of Fuel Control Switch (FCS) on all our Boeing 787 aircraft,” the airline’s flight operations department said in a communication to its pilots.

Thick black smoke rising from a residential area after Air India flight 171 crashed in Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025. Picture: Vijay Patani / AFP

“The inspections have been completed and no issues were found,” the communication said, noting that it had complied with the regulator’s directives.

It said all of its Boeing 787-8 aircraft had also undergone “Throttle Control Module (TCM) replacement as per the Boeing maintenance schedule”, adding that the FCS was part of this module.

India’s AAIB said it was still “too early to reach any definite conclusions”.

It said the investigation’s final report would come out with “root causes and recommendations”.

“We urge the public and the media to refrain from spreading premature narratives that risk undermining the integrity of the investigative process,” it said in a statement.
– With AFP