The long-awaited final report on Air India Flight 171’s 2025 crash confirms both engines were deliberately shut down midair, killing 260 people, yet with missing maintenance logs, redacted data, and no clear culprit, the tragedy now feels less like an accident—and more like a cover-up.

On June 21, 2025, at precisely 6:13 a.m., Air India Flight 171 — a Boeing 787 Dreamliner bound for Frankfurt — lifted off from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport under clear skies.

Less than two minutes later, the aircraft vanished from radar.

Witnesses along the Vasai Creek shoreline described a sudden silence before a fireball erupted across the horizon.

All 260 people on board perished instantly.

After nearly five months of investigation, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) released its final report this week — and it has only deepened the mystery surrounding one of the most haunting aviation disasters in recent memory.

According to the 428-page document, both of the Dreamliner’s Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines shut down within six seconds of each other, just moments after takeoff.

The finding stunned engineers worldwide.

Even more shocking was what investigators found in the cockpit: both fuel control switches — designed to supply power to the engines — had been manually set to “CUTOFF.”

That discovery alone has thrown the aviation community into turmoil.

How could two guarded switches — recessed and protected from accidental activation — be flipped off in near-perfect sequence at such a low altitude? The official report offers two primary theories: either a deliberate act by the crew or an unprecedented cascading system failure.

Yet neither explanation fully fits the evidence.

Captain Arjun Mehta, a veteran with 12,000 flight hours, was described by colleagues as “meticulous, quiet, and deeply professional.

” His co-pilot, First Officer Priya Khanna, was a rising star recently awarded for her quick decision-making during an engine stall simulation.

 

 

Both pilots had clean records and no signs of distress or misconduct.

Early rumors of a cockpit suicide have largely been dismissed by investigators.

Psychological profiles found no indication of mental instability, and the final 30 seconds of cockpit audio, while chaotic, contained no sounds of struggle, argument, or despair — only Mehta’s calm voice reading emergency checklists as both engines spooled down.

A key section of the report highlights what engineers call a “dual-engine logic anomaly.

” When the right engine failed, the left one entered an unexpected idle state, followed by a total shutdown moments later.

The onboard data recorder shows the auto-shutdown signal occurred milliseconds after a surge in electrical load — possibly linked to the aircraft’s RAT (ram air turbine) deployment, which activates during total power loss.

But even that explanation fails to account for the physical position of the switches.

As one investigator privately admitted, “Those levers cannot move themselves.

Something, or someone, moved them.”

Adding to the confusion are missing maintenance records.

A scheduled inspection of the fuel control module, completed just three days before the crash, was signed off by a ground engineer who later resigned and has not been reachable for comment.

Investigators have confirmed that one maintenance entry line was overwritten in the digital log, though the report attributes it to a “clerical sync error.”

The families of the victims, many of whom gathered outside the DGCA headquarters in New Delhi, expressed outrage.

“We waited months for answers,” said Rahul Gupta, who lost his wife and daughter.

“And now they tell us it could be suicide or software? That’s not truth.