00:00One month after the tragedy of Air India flight AI-171, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that was due to be flying from Ahmedabad in India to London Gatwick Airport,
00:15we now have the preliminary report from India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.
00:22It's just 15 pages long. There's lots of detail that we already knew, but there are some really critical passages.
00:33What we now know is that three seconds after takeoff, the fuel cutoff switches transitioned, that's the word that they used,
00:42from run, which is the normal state, to cutoff, which would only generally be used if there was an emergency,
00:50say one of the engines was on fire, or at the end of the journey.
00:56One pilot asks the other, why did you do that? The other replies, I didn't.
01:02And that will clearly be the focus of the investigators as they continue their work.
01:08We know tragically the effects. The aircraft reached a peak speed of 180 knots, 207 miles an hour,
01:16but with both engines starved of fuel, it rapidly lost velocity at the crucial point where it was needing all the power it could.
01:26Ten seconds after that transition, one of the engines was flipped back to run.
01:34Fourteen seconds after the transition, the other one followed.
01:38And the report makes clear that the engines were doing what they were supposed to, trying to recover power, but by then it was too late.
01:48And we now seem to have a final death toll, 241 passengers on board the aircraft, 19 on the ground.
01:58Many people will be reading the report, they will be seeing the commentary on this, and fearful about travel in future.
02:08Aviation remains extremely safe, and there will be lessons learnt from this terrible tragedy.
