Air India crash plane had record of safety defects, campaigners claim

Aviation safety campaigners in the United States say they have evidence a plane that crashed in India last year had previously suffered a series of technical failures, including an in-flight fire.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed on 12 June, shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad en route to London, killing 260 people.

The Foundation for Aviation Safety, a US campaign group, has sent a presentation to the US Senate outlining its findings, which it says are based on documents that have come into its possession.

The official investigation into the accident is ongoing. However, an interim report published in July sparked widespread speculation and controversy. Boeing declined to comment.

The aircraft involved in the accident, registered as VT-ANB, was one of the earliest 787s to be built. It first flew in late 2013, and entered service with Air India in early 2014.

The Foundation for Aviation Safety says documents show that the plane experienced system failures from its very first day in service for Air India. It alleges these were caused by “a wide and confusing variety of engineering, manufacturing, quality, and maintenance problems”.

The failures included electronics and software faults, circuit breakers tripping repeatedly, damage to wiring, short circuits, loss of electrical current, and overheating of power system components.

In January 2022, it says, there was a fire in the P100 power distribution panel. This is one of five such panels that take high-voltage power generated by the engines and distribute it around the aircraft.

The pilots started receiving fault messages during a descent into Frankfurt Airport – and the damage was discovered afterwards. It was so severe, the FAS says, that the entire panel had to be replaced.

The 787 relies more heavily on electrical systems than previous generations of passenger aircraft. In an attempt to improve efficiency, its designers got rid of numerous mechanical and pneumatic components, and replaced them with electrical ones, which were lighter.

However, this led to problems early in the aircraft’s existence, including a major battery fire on a plane owned by Japan Airlines in 2013, which led to a temporary grounding of the 787 fleet. The P100 panel itself was redesigned in 2010 following a fire on board a test aircraft.

The Foundation’s report has been sent to the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which last year held hearings into “Boeing’s broken safety culture”.

The official investigation into the Ahmedabad crash is being carried out by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB). American officials have also been taking part, as the aircraft and its engines were designed and built in the US.

A month after the accident, the AAIB published a preliminary report. This is standard practice in accident investigations, and is meant to provide a summary of the known facts at the time of publication. It will not usually draw firm conclusions.

However, a short section of this 15-page report generated significant controversy.

It states that moments after take-off, the plane’s fuel control switches, which are normally used when starting the engines before a flight and shutting them down afterwards, had been moved from the “run” to the “cut-off” position.

This would have deprived the engines of fuel, causing them to lose thrust rapidly. The switches were moved back to restart the engines, but too late to prevent the disaster.

The report then says: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cut-off. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.” The actual transcript is not provided.

That indirectly reported conversation prompted a number of commentators in the US and India to suggest that the accident had been caused by one of the pilots, either deliberately or inadvertently.

But there has since been a backlash from lawyers for the accident victims, safety campaigners, a pilots’ association and some technical experts in India and the US. They believe the focus on the pilots is misleading, and has diverted attention away from the possibility of a technical problem with the aircraft.

Since the report was issued, the BBC has spoken to a range of people within the industry, including pilots, accident investigators and engineers. While theories about what actually happened vary widely, there is a broad acknowledgement that important information is missing.

The Foundation for Aviation Safety is an organisation led by Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing’s Renton factory in Seattle, who has been an outspoken critic of the aerospace giant’s safety and quality control standards for years.

He has previously described the preliminary report into the Air India crash as “woefully inadequate… embarrassingly inadequate”.

The Foundation says its concerns about the 787 go beyond the aircraft involved in that accident. It says it has also examined some 2,000 reports of failures on hundreds of other aircraft in the US, Canada and Australia.

They include water leaks into wiring bays, which have previously been noted by US regulator the Federal Aviation Administration. Concerns about the aircraft have also been voiced in some other quarters.

Boeing has always maintained that the 787 is a safe aircraft with a strong record. Prior to the Ahmedabad crash, it had operated for nearly a decade and a half without a single fatality.

The BBC has not seen the documents referred to in the Foundation’s report.

Boeing declined to comment, as the investigation into the Air India crash is still ongoing. It referred queries about the crash to the AAIB.

Air India and the AAIB have been approached for comment.