US transport safety body says media reports on Air India crash 'too premature and speculative'

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said that it is too “premature” to draw conclusions about what caused the Air India flight from Ahmedabad to London to crash, as speculations about the pilots’ role come to the fore.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy in a post on X said, “Recent media reports on the Air India 171 crash are premature and speculative. India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau just released its preliminary report. Investigations of this magnitude take time.”

Statement from NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy:
“Recent media reports on the Air India 171 crash are premature and speculative. India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau just released its preliminary report. Investigations of this magnitude take time. We fully support the…

— NTSB Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) July 18, 2025

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Last week, AAIB released a 15-page-long preliminary report on the AI Flight 171 crash that killed 260 people in June. The report said that cutting off the fuel switches starved the engines, leading to the crash.

It also mentions a brief exchange between the two pilots from the cockpit audio recording, wherein one pilot was heard asking, “Why did you cut off?” to which the other pilot replied, “I did not.”

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It can take a year, or even longer, for authorities to issue a final report detailing the likely cause of an accident and offering recommendations to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Meanwhile, investigators are trying to determine how and why the fuel switches were turned off and whether they were the result of human action or a failure of the plane’s systems.

At the same time, Air India has completed an inspection of the locking mechanism on the fuel switch control switches on its Boeing 787 aircraft, concluding that there are no issues with the system.

An airline official said, “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 inspections have been completed and no issues were found.”

The official also highlighted that all Boeing 787-8 aircraft in the fleet are equipped with the Throttle Control Module (TCM), which was replaced under Boeing’s maintenance schedule, and the FCS was part of this module.