UK aviation regulator asks Air India why Boeing with fuel switch issue was cleared to fly

Civil Aviation Authority warns of regulatory action if the airline doesn’t submit a complete response within a week

The British aviation regulator has reportedly sought a “detailed” explanation after a Boeing Dreamliner plane was grounded in India for safety checks immediately after arriving from London, with pilots flagging an issue with a fuel switch.

The Air India flight from Heathrow to Bangalore on Sunday had developed the issue during engine start.

The crew noticed that one of the two fuel control switches failed to stay locked in the “run” position twice, only stabilising at the third attempt. The jet then took off for the journey.

When the pilot flagged the issue after landing, there was widespread alarm as fuel control switches, which regulate the flow of jet fuel into the aircraft engines, were implicated in last year’s Air India crash in western India.

The crash, the deadliest aviation disaster in decades, killed 241 of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 bound for London as well as 19 on the ground.

Following the Heathrow incident, the UK Civil Aviation Authority formally asked Air India to provide a detailed report on why the plane was cleared to fly despite the issue and warned of regulatory action against the airline and its Boeing 787 fleet, Reuters reported.

In a letter on Tuesday, the regulator asked Air India to provide "a detailed account of all maintenance actions performed to ensure the continued airworthiness of the aircraft”.

It also sought a "comprehensive root-cause analysis" of why the switch behaved that way, and a “preventive action plan” to ensure the issue did not recur anywhere in the fleet.

The letter came after Air India said it had completed a precautionary re-inspection of the fuel control switches and found no issue. The airline said it would "respond to the UK regulator accordingly".

The aviation authority said in a statement it was standard for a regulator to request details following a plane incident and was “in line with safety assurance procedures”.

But it warned of the possibility of regulatory action against Air India and its Boeing 787 fleet if the airline did not submit a complete response within a week.

Boeing said earlier it was cooperating with Air India on the incident.

Reuters reported that an internal Air India memo on Wednesday said it had checked the fuel switches on all of its Boeing 787s and "no issues were found". Air India has a total of 33 Boeing 787, according to Flight Radar.

A preliminary report into the Air India crash released last June found the plane's fuel control switches had almost simultaneously flipped from “run” to “cutoff” within three seconds of take-off, starving the engines. But it did not establish how the movement occurred.