The troubling cockpit dialogue revealed in a preliminary report into the June 12 crash of Air India flight 171 – which killed all but one of the 242 passengers on board – is likely to haunt investigators, relatives and the public alike.

Immediately after the Boeing 787 Dreamliner reached sufficient airspeed for take-off from Ahmedabad bound for London, “Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another”, India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau report says.

Then the report details a piece of dialogue – unattributed to the speaker – from the cockpit voice recording: “one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cut off [the fuel switches]”.

Handled poorly, the already traumatic aftermath of a crash can become a gateway to conspiracy theories. Credit: AP

“The other pilot responded that he did not do so.”

It’s unclear if the inclusion of this snippet of conversation is a flawed effort at transparency by the Indian crash investigators or whether it points to the direction the probe is taking.

Aviation experts are already weighing in on the preliminary findings.

The fact the report didn’t release a synced up account of the snippet of dialogue with the flight data recording “confused things”, says pilot Byron Bailey.

In his view,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald