The Impossible Crash?

The mystery of what happened to Air India flight AI17 gets deeper the more we learn. Conspiracy theories will abound. But the truth might be simple ... and dreadful.

There are plane crashes that make sense in a horrifying, tragic sort of way. A bad storm. A mechanical failure. A cockpit overwhelmed with alarms.

Then there are crashes that seem, at first glance, so incomprehensible that the only reaction is stunned disbelief — followed, inevitably, by a thousand conspiracy theories.

The crash of Air India Flight AI-423 — a Boeing 787 Dreamliner that went down in June, killing 260 people — is about to become one of those cases.

And before the YouTubers and the clickbait grifters get a hold of it, we should understand something important: this story is already strange enough without needing to invent phantoms. The real facts are more haunting than anything a conspiracy theorist could cook up.

Let’s go through what we know, at least so far, and it is to be hoped that something emerges which does make sense of this... because right now, nothing makes sense, and the myriad conspiracy theories make the least sense of all.

The flight had just departed from Ahmedabad, India. The take-off was smooth, the aircraft healthy. The Dreamliner climbed normally. Three seconds after liftoff, something extraordinary — and fatal — occurred.

According to the preliminary data, the plane’s two fuel cutoff switches flipped from RUN to CUTOFF, one after the other, with just a second between them.

That just doesn’t happen because someone turned the wrong way in the pilot’s seat. These are not switches you can casually bump.

They are physically guarded. You have to lift a spring-loaded cover and deliberately move the switch. They’re spaced far enough apart that a pilot would need to use both hands or move deliberately from one to the other.

Boeing designed it that way on purpose — so that you couldn’t just “fat-finger” your way into a catastrophe. And yet, here we are.

The flight data recorder seems to suggest that both switches flipped.

As in, were physically moved.

And whilst an electrical fault is being examined closely, if the data comes back and says that those switches did, in fact, move — then we’re in the Twilight Zone.

What we do know, for sure, is what the effects were.

The fuel supply to both engines was cut off.

Seconds later, as the engines shut down and the aircraft lost lift, someone in the cockpit tried to switch them back on. Too late. The engines began the relight process, but one failed to recover in time. The plane crashed just beyond the airport perimeter.

What makes this incident so disturbing isn’t just the sequence of events — it’s the cockpit voice recording. After the switches were thrown, one pilot asks the other: “Why did you cut off?” The response? “I didn’t.”

And that’s where the story shifts from tragic to being something deeply unsettling.

Because if neither pilot admits to doing it — and the switches moved anyway — we are left with a scenario that defies the normal rules of cockpit procedure, logic, and aviation psychology.

This wasn’t a suicide.

These guys were in the final moments of their lives, and if it’s a suicide then the deed was done and there’s no need for that conversation. Besides, they tried to switch the engines on again... that would be the worst aborted suicide attempt in history, and up there with the weirdest.

It wasn’t sabotage.

And so far as we know, it wasn’t a ghost in the machine.

It may, in fact, have been something worse. Something far scarier than any James Bond-type conspiracy where some electronic black-box tripped those switches from a mile away.

It is far scarier than the only other alternative theory that makes sense: that this is a glitch somewhere — a short, a software screw-up that told the FADEC system to shut off and led to that bizarre cockpit exchange just before disaster struck.

It may have been a moment where someone, somehow, in a weird sort of funk, accidentally, unknowingly, shut down both engines on a perfectly healthy aircraft at 180 knots and 200 feet off the ground.

And here’s the real kicker: it may be that no one ever learns how.

The Boeing 787 is a modern marvel of digital systems and fly-by-wire automation. But crucially, there is no software, no automated process, and no electrical quirk known to engineers that could physically flip those guarded switches.

FADEC — the Full Authority Digital Engine Control system — can adjust fuel flow and manage relights, but it cannot command those physical cutoff switches to move. That has to be done by hand.

This was not like the infamous MCAS software on the 737 MAX that nosedived two aircraft into the ground — this wasn’t software gone rogue.

If those switches moved, then that was an action — the difference between a glitch that shuts down your computer and the physical act of you pressing the button and doing it yourself.

No short can press that button.

No short can flick those switches.

And that’s why investigators are now combing over every millisecond of data. They’re examining voltage traces from the switches themselves — because in aviation, those traces tell a story.

If the voltage changes look like a clean, manual switch transition — a smooth curve, consistent timing — then this wasn’t a glitch.

It was a human hand. Twice. Within a second. And if that’s what happened, then the question becomes: “what would possess a pilot to do that?”

That’s the question no one can answer.

Maybe — and this is the best theory currently on the table — one pilot saw something, misread it, panicked, and reached for what they thought was the right response.

Maybe they thought they were flipping something else. Maybe they were trying to troubleshoot an imagined failure. Maybe it was a total mental freeze — a moment of catastrophic disorientation.

Yet there was no engine fire. No alarm. No indication that cutting fuel was necessary. The aircraft was behaving exactly as expected.

If this was an attempt to correct a problem, then why that discussion where one pilot asks the other why he did it and he denies that he did?

Did he not know that he’d done it?

Because that’s the realm we might well be in here.

An accident so unlikely as to be one that would be termed impossible. Unprecedented. But so many things in history were unprecedented until suddenly there was a precedent for them.

If human beings can mess something up, then on a long enough timeline, one of them will. That’s a fact we’d all sooner forget. Yet it’s a fact nonetheless.

Which brings us to the edge of what any safety protocol can prepare for: the truly inexplicable. That human moment of weirdness.

This wasn’t a system flaw. It wasn’t sabotage. And it almost certainly wasn’t an accident in the traditional sense.

If it turns out to be human error, it will be the most incomprehensible cockpit mistake in the history of commercial aviation.

And that’s what makes this case dangerous in the public imagination.

Because the moment people hear “Dreamliner,” “fuel cutoff,” and “confused pilots,” the conspiracy mill is going to start turning.

People will suggest remote hacks, secret commands, hidden faults.

They’ll point to Boeing’s troubled recent history — and yes, Boeing absolutely deserves scrutiny for years of quality control lapses. But this isn’t about a missing bolt or a software patch.

This is about something scarier: the fact that human beings, even when not under pressure, can do things no one expects — even when they’ve been trained not to. Even when they themselves don’t realise they’re doing it.

How do you correct for that? Hold a seminar in which you have to tell trained flight officers that they should not shut down the fuel supply to the engines when the plane is in flight?

Does that really require saying?

Well, maybe it does now. Yes.

In ten years, if this report holds, we’ll see the families on TV.

They’ll say — understandably, heartbreakingly — “there’s no way they made that mistake.” And maybe after them, an air crash investigator will quietly say, “but nothing else fits.” And they’ll be right.

Because once you rule out what is impossible — and almost nothing else seems like it could have happened here — we’ll be left with the only thing that ever brings planes down after all the systems are found to have worked.

A moment. A hand. A switch. And why?

We might never know, except for this: people. People sometimes do inexplicable stuff.

That truth is scarier than any mad story the crackpots can possibly dream up.