'Unfortunate': Govt sources refute US media report on pilot's role in Air India plane crash

Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and First Officer Clive Kunder were flying the dreaded Air India flight.

After a recent report by The Wall Street Journal suggested that the fuel was cut off by the captain of the Air India flight that crashed in Ahmedabad on June 12, top government sources issued a rebuttal stating "unfortunate selective leaks were made to the foreign media", according to CNN-News18.

Reacting on the report, government sources told CNN-News18 that there could be no reason the conversation between the two pilots, retrieved via the cockpit recording, be twisted to present that the fuel control switch was deliberately turned off by the senior pilot.

Furthermore, the sources said that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, senior pilot on the flight, came from a strong family background of civil aviation, as his father is a retired from the Civil Aviation Ministry.

There are no reasons to support the claims that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal may have been under stress, sources told CNN-News18.

A cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots of the Air India flight that crashed last month indicates the captain cut the flow of fuel to the plane's engines, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

However, a preliminary report into the crash released by Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) last week stated that one pilot was heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he cut off the fuel and "the other pilot responded that he did not do so."

Investigators did not identify which remarks were made by Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and which by First Officer Clive Kunder, who had total flying experience of 15,638 hours and 3,403 hours, respectively, according to Reuters.

The WSJ report, on the other hand, claimed that Kunder, who was flying the plane, asked Sabharwal why he moved the fuel switches to the "cutoff" position seconds after lifting off the runway.

The Journal did not say if there was any evidence that Sabharwal did move the switches, beyond the verbal exchange it cited.

On June 12, an Air India flight from Ahmedabad to London crashed into a medical college shortly after takeoff. The crash killed 260 people, including everybody onboard but one passenger and several other people on the ground.