Comment by groos
2 days ago
Suicide is quite a stretch without any supporting evidence from the pilots' backgrounds. I would take mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memory, even a defective fuel cutoff system over suicide.
2 days ago
Suicide is quite a stretch without any supporting evidence from the pilots' backgrounds. I would take mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memory, even a defective fuel cutoff system over suicide.
>mental fog, cognitive overload, wrong muscle memor
Agreed. The sequence of events also supports this.
I believe one of the pilots made a terrible muscle memory mistake and cutoff the fuel instead of raising the landing gear. This would explain why the landing gear was never raised, why the pilot who was accused of cutting off the fuel denied it (in his mind he had only retracted the landing gear) and why the engines were turned back on after presumably realizing the mistake.
This also makes sense with why nobody on the recording mentions re engaging the fuel switches
The pilot denies shutting off the fuel, then realises he'd done it accidentally and quietly reenables them hoping there's enough time to save them
Were the landing gear switches and fuel cutoff switches pretty close to each other here?
Not really. Landing gear switches are above the throttle between the screens¹, fuel cutoff switches are below it².
¹) https://youtu.be/RbmFmWqqq0c?t=19
²) https://youtu.be/33hG9-BCJVQ?t=5
(I'm not an expert, I just watched these videos)