Fuel cut-off on 787 “can’t happen by accident”

ODN

Flight instructor Alan Colman says it’s nearly impossible to accidentally move engine fuel switches on a Boeing 787, after a preliminary report into the deadly Air India crash found the controls had been set to "off" during take-off. He said no pilot would normally touch them at that stage. Report by Etemadil. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00On that particular aircraft, there are quite a thick toggle switch, a bit like an old-fashioned light switch,

00:06but you have to actually pull the toggle switch up with a couple of fingers against the spring

00:11and move it out of the D-10 and then move it into the new position.

00:14So it's not going to happen by accident, so you'd have to make it move by hand.

00:20So it's pretty much unheard of, really.

00:23We're in a Boeing 737 simulator cockpit.

00:26So this is a different aircraft than the 787 Dreamliner.

00:32But the philosophy is very broadly similar in terms of where the controls are placed.

00:36We've got our thrust levers here and we've got the fuel switches here,

00:39which are slightly different than they would be in the aircraft we're talking about.

00:45But it has similar protections.

00:46I mean, if we want to close the fuel lever, we've got to lift it out.

00:49It's run loaded.

00:51And then we have to yank it down to stop it.

00:54So if my hand slipped off the throttle, it's not going to knock that out.

00:58If I had something else in my hand and dropped a clipboard on it or something like that,

01:02it's very, very unlikely to cause that fuel lever to go.

01:06So there's our protection.

01:08That is exactly why they're there.

01:09If we were to close the thrust levers, what will happen is that we should see indications on our engine here,

01:19showing that the engine is decaying, the thrust is decaying.

01:23And we would start to see pressures drop here as the oil system starts to register that the engine is shutting down.

01:29So at this point, we're fairly aware there's a problem.

01:35And it would be readily apparent that we've lost thrust there.

01:38We can see we've lost power coming out from the engines.

01:42We've got the generators online now.

01:44In this case, the first thing we would probably do is get the auxiliary power unit started,

01:48which is a small gas turbine at the rear of the aircraft that generates electrical power and compressed air for starting.

01:57So we would need that compressed air to get these engines started, really.

02:00It would be the most sensible thing to do.

02:02And it would also be able to deliver power here.

02:04But that will take up to a couple of minutes to come online, really.

02:07Maybe a minute and a half, two minutes, before that system comes online.

02:11So in the situation of the aircraft that we're talking about, the Air India accident,

02:17there wouldn't be that amount of time.

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