The flaw in the fuel control switches (FCS) flagged by the Air India crew has drawn attention to whether the airline failed to notice the problem during safety checks of its Dreamliner fleet after the Ahmedabad crash that killed 260 people in June 2025, experts question. The airline has ordered another round of checks following the recent incident.

After landing in Bengaluru from London, the pilot of Air India’s AI132 recorded FCS problems in the defect log book on Monday. The memo mentioned that the left engine fuel switch went from RUN to CUT OFF and was not locking in position.

Amit Singh of the Safety Matters Foundation said the Boeing 787’s fuel switch failure during flight AI132, advancing to CUTOFF at engine start, is the exact malfunction that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned about in 2018.
“This comes after the airline said fleet-wide checks found no issues. With the tragic AI171 787 accidents under investigation, this repeated failure calls for immediate and transparent action by the DGCA and Boeing,” Singh said.

Air India has 26 B787-8s in its fleet of 190 aircraft. Air India conducted a series of safety checks on its fleet after the accident and no problem with the FCS was found. Air India is the largest operator of 33 B787 aircraft, including seven B787-9s, in India. IndiGo has a B787 on lease from Nordic Airlines.

Several aviation experts have flagged a manufacturing defect with the Boeing B787 Dreamliner plane after the crash. A US-based aviation safety group in its Complaint Report to the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) on January 12 said the Air India plane suffered from several engineering, manufacturing, quality and maintenance problems throughout its 11-year life.

“This resulted in electrical system failures to include repeatedly tripping circuit breakers, electronic/avionics/software errors, cable damage, smoke and fumes, short circuits, loss of electrical current, electrical surges, burns and overheating of power distribution components, including a very serious fire,” he said.

The preliminary report by the Air Accidents Investigation Bureau (AAIB) released a month later sparked controversy as it had an excerpt of a conversation between the pilots, where one of them could be heard asking the other why they were cutting the fuel supply to the engine.

The US-based Aviation Safety Foundation said the documents indicate that the systems failures began on the first day the plane arrived in India on February 1, 2014.