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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

July 15, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

India’s aviation regulator has ordered the country’s airlines to examine the fuel cut-off switches on Boeing aircraft, two days after a preliminary report on the Air India flight 171 crash in June found these switches on the ill-fated aircraft had turned off. The DGCA did not mention the preliminary findings of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) released on Saturday, but issued its order in light of “several” operators, domestically and internationally, deciding to conduct checks on the Boeing aircrafts’ fuel control switch locking mechanisms in line with a 2018 US advisory that found mention in the AAIB’s report. South Korea was also preparing to order all airlines in the country that operate Boeing jets to examine the switches.

Unlike preliminary reports on crashes involving Boeing aircraft in other countries, the Indian account did not identify the pilots speaking or directly quote their conversation with each other. “The report is very murky and very inexact,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an aerospace engineer and analyst at aviation consultancy Leeham News and Analysis to The Financial Times. “It’s not good for the airline.” In a memo to staff on Monday, Air India chief executive Campbell Wilson said the report “provided both greater clarity and opened additional questions” that had “triggered a new round of speculation in the media”.

The International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA) called on all stakeholders to refrain from speculating about the cause of the tragic Air India and rejected premature conclusions based on the preliminary report blaming pilots for the crash. “Whilst this preliminary report by its very nature raises many questions, it does not provide answers, and any extrapolation can only be regarded as guesswork, which is not helpful to the good conduct