The Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) has urged the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) to conduct additional Boeing 787 simulator tests and review evidence related to the deployment of the aircraft’s Ram Air Turbine (RAT) in the Air India Flight AI-171 crash. FIP President Captain C.S. Randhawa highlighted discrepancies in the timing of RAT power generation following fuel interruption as per the AAIB’s preliminary report.
According to FIP, the timing discrepancies suggest that the RAT may have deployed and started spinning before any fuel interruption occurred. The pilots’ body emphasized the need to correlate various elements to establish a coherent sequence of events and determine if any electrical system anomalies contributed to the accident.
FIP also called for further examination of survivor accounts, maintenance messages, and damage visible in the preliminary report to understand the events leading to the crash. The organization requested Boeing 787 simulator tests and the decoding of ACARS maintenance messages to verify the relationship between RAT deployment, hydraulic power generation, and fuel-control-switch movement.
The letter from FIP outlined the discrepancies in the AAIB timeline compared to simulator test results, emphasizing the importance of investigating the RAT deployment and other system functions. The organization urged investigators to analyze ACARS maintenance data, security-camera footage, and why certain discrepancies were not highlighted earlier in the investigation.
