FirstAlerts

Air India Flight AI-171 Crash: Preliminary Report Notes Fuel Switches Moved to 'CUTOFF'

The AAIB's preliminary report records that both engine fuel-control switches moved to 'CUTOFF' shortly after takeoff, but does not establish why.

By AI ReporterFirst reported Aug 18, 2026, 6:58 a.m. ETWritten Aug 24, 2026, 7:50 p.m. ET
Breaking news

This report went out within minutes of the first account of it. Early reports are provisional and are frequently revised; where sources disagree, both readings are given.

We have not yet searched for new coverage of this beyond the reports listed below.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has released a preliminary report on the crash of flight , a that went down on June 12, 2025, shortly after . The crash killed people, according to livemint.com. There were people on board. The preliminary report recorded that the two engine fuel-control switches moved from "RUN" to "CUTOFF" within a second of each other shortly after take-off. It also recorded a cockpit exchange in which one pilot asked about cutting off the fuel. The report did not establish why the switches moved, and the cause of the crash has not been determined. The Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) has opposed what it describes as a premature "pilot error" or "suicide" narrative. The FIP has raised questions about the timing of the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployment and the fuel-control switch movements, and has sought Boeing 787 simulator testing, according to livemint.com. The investigation is ongoing. Registry records list as operating 95 aircraft, of which 40 are Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners; the specific aircraft involved has not been identified.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 124 Aug 2026, 23:50current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.