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July 15, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
29:24
20250715_never-seen-anything-like-it-captain-steeeve-on-air
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Intentional Or Unintentional Switches 00:09:51
They want desperately to blame this on Boeing, and I don't want to blame it on the pilots.
I'm the last guy that wants to do that.
Some things are plain and some things are clear.
Is it looking more and more like the plane functioned perfectly correctly and that therefore it was something done by the pilot?
There is no universe where there's any procedure ever in the history of commercial flight where you place both fuel control switches to cutoff, leave them there for 10 seconds right after rotate.
There is just not a scenario that that fits into.
Well, last month, Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after taking off en route to London.
The disaster killed 260 people, including 241 of the 242 passengers, instantly becoming one of the worst aviation catastrophes in years.
Investigations are still ongoing, but the latest data retrieved from the black boxes indicates it may not necessarily have been an accident.
So what did happen?
Well, commercial pilot and aviation commentator Steve Schneibner has provided invaluable insights and expert analysis to millions of followers since the crash.
And I'm pleased to say that Captain Steve joins me now.
Steve, great to have you on Uncensored.
Your commentary on this extraordinary story has been viewed many millions of times now.
So I want to start, because maybe some people have not seen the footage originally of the crash.
I want to start by just showing what happened.
And then I'm going to get into all the details with you.
But just to start with, talk me through what we're looking at here.
So that's one of the two videos that surfaced initially.
There's the second one of the airplane taking it off.
And what we can see here is that the airplane gains lift.
It's got enough speed to gain flight.
But shortly after that, something happens to cause a loss of lift over the wings.
We now know due to the preliminary report that it was a dual engine failure.
And that dual engine failure was due to fuel being cut off to the engines.
And so with that being said, the whole flight was less than 60 seconds long.
And now the preliminary report has told us, you know, exactly how they lost fuel to both of those engines and then lost lift.
So explain the significance of this new revelation about both of the fuel things being off at the same time.
What does that mean to a pilot of your experience?
What does that mean?
So the fuel control switches are the things that everybody is talking about.
And those are the two mechanisms.
They're mechanical.
They're spring-loaded.
It's a three-step process.
You pull it out, lift it up, and then you drop it over a detent and the spring holds it in place.
It's a very simple mechanism.
Both engines have one.
It opens up the fuel valves to the engine.
And now the fuel, along with the spark, the engine will light off.
And those turbine engines will continue to run until they're fuel starved.
I fuel starve the engines on every flight.
When I get to the gate and I set the parking brake, I instruct my co-pilot to take those fuel control switches from run.
He pulls them up, drops them down, lowers them into place.
It's a three-step process.
Both of those, we fuel starve the engine, we shut down and everybody gets off the airplane.
So it's a very simple mechanism.
It's not real complicated, but that's apparently from the preliminary report what happened.
Both of those fuel control switches were placed to cut off.
Now, in all your time, have you heard of a passenger plane pilot doing that at that moment of takeoff?
No, I have never seen anything like this before.
There's no known procedure that I know of where at 300 or 400 feet, you would place both of those fuel control switches to cutoff and then leave them there for 10 seconds before returning them back to the run position.
According to the report, that's exactly what happened.
They were placed one at a time into the cutoff position a second apart from each other.
That would be consistent with a one-handed operation.
You can't reach over and grab both of them.
It's got to be just one hand.
So you do one and then you would do the other.
The idea that maybe one of them somehow slipped out of the detent on its own is hard enough to believe, but both of them, it's not believable.
So the captain of the plane was a Captain Sub Arwal.
Now, he was very experienced.
And the cockpit voice recording has captured one pilot asking the other, why did he use the cutoff?
To which the person replies, he didn't.
The recording doesn't clarify who said what.
At the time of the takeoff, the co-pilot was flying the aircraft while the captain was monitoring.
So specifically in relation to that, Captain Steve, what does that indicate to you?
Well, I think you have to look at how the question was phrased.
You know, you can see those fuel cutoff switches out of the corner of your eye.
And so when pilots are rotating the aircraft off the ground, they're using almost exclusively their peripheral vision, right?
Because as they pull the nose up, all they're going to see in front of them is sky.
They have no reference.
So out the side of your eyes, you're going to see the ground begin to lower.
And that's a normal thing.
At the same time, if somebody reaches over to grab those fuel control switches, that's going to be very unusual.
That's not a normal thing.
Your brain's going to register.
Like, what did I just see?
If they had somehow just slipped out of the detent and down into cutoff, I think the question would have been more along the lines of what happened or why did that happen?
Not why did you do that?
I think they saw something.
That explains that question to me a whole lot better than they just somehow slipped out of the position.
I think they saw some movement over there connected with that.
And it would make sense because they were done one second apart.
And typically we start and we cut off the engines at the gate left to right, the number one engine to the number two.
And in the report, they said the left engine was shut down first and then the right a second after it.
So there's something called the rat, the ram air turbine.
Essentially, it's an emergency propeller.
That was also deployed.
And my understanding is that is also incredibly rare for that to happen on takeoff and so quickly.
Is that your understanding?
Yeah, the rat is an instrument of last resort.
It's designed to give the pilot a little bit of electrical power, enough to shoot an approach and to talk on a radio and enough hydraulic power to operate the aircraft so they can land it safely.
It's connected always with a dual engine failure.
I think on the 787, it also deploys if there's a total electrical failure or a total hydraulic failure.
In this case, now we know it was the dual engine failure that caused the rat to deploy.
I've never seen one deploy that close to the ground.
And one of the things that bothered me right from the beginning with this whole scenario was how quickly the rat deployed.
If an engine or both engines fail, typically it will take some time for them to fail, 30 seconds to 60 seconds for those big engines to spool down to the point where the rat then would get the command to come out and give them that electrical and hydraulic pressure.
It doesn't give them any thrust, by the way.
It's designed to be at 35,000 feet.
If you lost both engines, you could glide the airplane down and still fly it.
At 400 feet, you just simply don't have the altitude.
But that rat looks like it deployed immediately, which would be consistent with both fuel control switches being set to cutoff.
Part of the logic in the computer would instantaneously deploy that rat.
So that was a big question mark in my mind after the report came out that said both fuel control switches ended up in cutoff.
That explained why the rat came out so quickly.
So it would be an automatic computer generated response.
The airplane was operating exactly the way it was designed to operate regarding the rat for sure.
Look, this was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
There have been a lot of issues with Boeing recently.
From everything that you have now gleaned about this, including the initial reports, is it looking more and more like the plane functioned perfectly correctly and that therefore it was something done by the pilot or co-pilot?
Well, my take on it is the airplane was operating exactly the way it was designed.
I don't think there was anything wrong with this particular aircraft.
When you place both fuel cutoff switches to cutoff, that will fuel starve the engines and they'll both flame out.
You'll stop getting thrust out of those engines.
I understand the complexities with Boeing over the years, and I think they're two separate issues.
I've heard a thousand comments on my last couple of videos of people that they want desperately to blame this on Boeing, and I don't want to blame it on the pilots.
I'm the last guy that wants to do that.
Some things are plain and some things are clear.
Whether it was intentional placing of the fuel control switches to cutoff or unintentional, that's two different things.
But I really firmly believe that there had to be a human hand on both of those for them to go to cutoff.
I don't think Boeing has fault in this one.
They might have fault in some other things in the past, but you can't confuse the two things and try to make it work so that Boeing is to blame.
I don't think they are.
So this then leads to the theory which is gathering most momentum, which is this was not an accident, that some action by one of the pilots, and most attention has formed on the most experienced pilot, Captain Subarwal, that according to the Telegraph, he was the lead pilot because considering leaving the airline early to look after his elderly father, his mother had died, apparently, and he'd been quite depressed about that.
Mental Health And Flight Fatigue 00:02:19
Other reports in Indian media, I think, which were relayed also over here, had him, a neighbor of Captain Subarwal, saying the pilot told her, just one or two more flights, then I'm going to be just with Papa.
He apparently suffered from mental health issues and depression, had taken time off in the last few years following his mother's death.
Now, just to be clear, we don't know whether any of that is relevant to what happened here, but it's certainly, if you were pursuing the theory of a murder-suicide, which is now gathering momentum, if you put together all this stuff about the captain, it's not massively far-fetched.
And again, we don't know, but it's not massively far-fetched to see a sort of line here where the captain has had some kind of mental health episode and has deliberately shut these two fuel switches off.
What do you think?
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Deliberate Act Or Accidental Mistake 00:15:27
Well, I've heard those same reports as well.
That is not my area of expertise.
I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not here to diagnose anybody after the fact.
However, it is a very stressful job piloting.
And, you know, fatigue is a factor.
And, you know, balancing your home life and being on the road and living out of a suitcase.
Those of us in any profession that travel a whole lot, those things are difficult things to balance sometimes in our lives.
You throw on top of it the stress and the responsibility and the trust that the general public places in us every day flying those big jets.
They're complicated.
All of that stuff, they're all factors.
But I'm not the guy to weigh in and say, you know, I know definitively one way or another.
I do know that on my YouTube channel, we're starting a conversation now about mental health and emotional health with pilots.
Regardless of whether that was the factor or the cause here, there's never a bad time to have that conversation, right?
Because the general public is sitting in the back of the airplane, trusting us that when we show up to work, we're ready to go fly an airplane.
And that means emotionally and mentally.
So I've worked something into my pre-flight brief that 34 years ago, I was flying with a student and this student was a great student.
But this one day we were flying together, he was totally off.
And I just turned to him and I said, is everything okay?
And he looked at me and tears started coming down his face.
I said, I got the aircraft.
I took it.
I said, man, tell me what's going on.
His dad had been up until three in the morning trying to commit suicide.
And this student had been on the phone talking his dad out of it.
Three hours later, he's in an airplane trying to fly.
That's not a time to go flying.
No.
So we took care of that.
But I think the conversation now going forward with my fellow pilots is always, hey, how you doing?
And I ask them that sincerely.
And if I get the, you know, fine, I dig a little deeper.
You know, I go, everything okay at home?
You ready to fly today?
And if I get a smile and a thumbs up, yeah, then we're great.
Every once in a while, somebody says, Are you serious about that question?
I say, yeah, I'm very serious about it.
They go, well, I'm okay to go flying today, but if you don't mind, you know, I wouldn't mind somebody to talk to.
So that's an important conversation for pilots to be having with fellow pilots.
Yeah.
The Indian Commercial Pilots Association, ICPA, said the crew acted in line with their training and responsibilities under challenging conditions, and the pilots shouldn't be vilified based on conjecture.
To casually suggest pilot suicide without verified evidence is a gross violation of ethical reporting and a disservice to the dignity of the profession.
And other people point to the fact that only 19 people on the ground were killed, which they say suggests the pilots had heroically diverted the plane, as they were lauded with doing for a while, to avoid residential population.
If this was deliberate, goes the argument, then why would that happen?
I guess the answer to that could be, well, the co-pilot might have engineered that if he felt that the pilot had gone rogue and done something nefarious.
In the end, Captain Steve, you put it all together.
To me, I'm not an expert, you are.
But to me, it stretches credulity to think that a pilot of that experience, and the co-pilot was very experienced too.
They'd had a lot of hours flying that one of them would suddenly, for no explicable reason whatsoever, do something which would inevitably cause that plane to crash.
Unless it was a deliberate act.
I mean, how could that happen accidentally?
I mean, many passengers, I fly all the time.
My immediate thought was, well, if it's not deliberate, how on earth can pilots just crash a plane like that by accident?
Just by flicking a switch.
Right.
Well, the mathematics behind it is it's two and a half billion to one, a dual engine flame out right after takeoff in a 787.
So anything we talk about with this incident falls into that category of two and a half billion to one.
So everything just seems unbelievable.
And even the pilot reaching over and cutting off the fuel control switches, whether it was intentional or a mistake, both of those fall into the category of pilot error.
We do know that the switches were placed to cutoff and 10 seconds later they were placed back to run.
Remembering now that there's two pilots up in that cockpit, if one did it, the other probably was the one that undid it.
But they only had a 60-second flight and they didn't have a lot of lift over those wings.
So if the one pilot tried to steer away from a larger building into a smaller building, that was about as good as it was going to get on a short flight like that.
But again, if the one person did it, let's not say it was intentional.
Let's say it was unintentional.
The other person realized it and they did place them back to run.
They tried to get those engines running again.
Clearly, if I had 30 seconds left in that flight, I would do what I could with that short time span to get it pointed someplace where it caused the least loss of life.
But could you ever imagine doing that yourself accidentally?
No.
Do you think any experienced pilot would have the same answer?
Well, I said this in my last video on my channel.
I said there is no universe where there's any procedure ever in the history of commercial flight where you place both fuel control switches to cutoff, leave them there for 10 seconds right after rotate.
There is just not a scenario that that fits into.
And this, according to the report, that's what happened.
There is a dual engine flame out procedure where you take both switches and place them to cutoff and then immediately back to run to restart the engines.
That's done within a second of each other.
There's no procedure where you leave them there for 10 seconds and then put them back into the run position.
There just isn't.
Could the computer, which you've already said automatically deployed the rat, could the computer have malfunctioned and actually done the switches?
Or is that not physically possible?
Well, anything is possible, but according to the report now, remember, there's lots of eyeballs on that report.
There was Boeing, the NTSB, the FAA, the AAIB, the Canadians were involved.
Lots of people had input into that report.
According to that report, the physical switches were placed to cutoff.
Now, they do that in conjunction with the cockpit voice recorder.
The voice part of the CVR is what throws us off.
We think it's only recording the voices.
Any sound in that cockpit is recorded.
So the flight data recorder is going to show that the engines were cut off at the switch.
You're also going to hear on the cockpit voice recorder the click click of that motion.
So they're putting those two things together to say they were physically placed to cutoff.
And then 10 seconds later, they were placed back to run.
I don't think this was an electrical glitch.
They would have said that in the report if it was.
Is it possible it could have been?
Yeah, but they didn't say that in the report.
So I'm just sticking with what they've reported to us at this point.
One passenger survived, Vish Ramesh, who lives in the UK.
Already, as happens with every story like this, conspiracy theorists have started up saying it's impossible that one person could survive.
I think that's exactly what happened.
What's your view of all the conspiracy theories raging?
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Well, probably the better way to put it is it's improbable, but it's not impossible, clearly, because he's got a ticket to prove where he was.
He was seated in front of what's called the wing spar, and that's the heaviest, hardest part of the aircraft.
So at the leading edge of both wings where they attach to the fuselage, there's basically a steel girder underneath that holds those two together.
I think he was in the perfect spot for that.
That steel girder took most of the impact.
He was right next to the exit door, which burst open.
He looked like a pretty strong strapping guy.
That was helpful.
And at that point, when the impact and they came to a stop, I'm surprised, A, the fireball or the heat didn't get to him.
But if that door was open and he had the presence of mind, obviously, to jump out and flee, he looked like he did have a few burns on him.
But that would be the only way to explain what happened is he was the one in, what, 300 people that walked away from that thing.
Absolutely.
Unbelievable.
Incredible part of the story.
There seem to have been a number of plane-related incidents, crashes, and so on in the last couple of years.
Is it a reality that more are happening than, say, in the previous decade or two decades or not?
Well, I think aviation in general has become much safer in the last 15 years.
I mean, you haven't heard of any major crashes until just kind of this year.
The pandemic kind of masked it a little bit because flying really dropped off.
And so there was basically half as many airplanes in the air.
So there's going to be half as many mishaps.
And then once one happens, it gets into the news cycle and we're a little bit more conscious about it.
Clearly, something as large as Air ND 171 is a catastrophic tragedy.
And that's going to get a lot of attention around the planet.
But if you look back over the last 15, basically to 20 years, it's still the safest way to travel.
There have been very, very few incidents with loss of life.
People say, look, with AI, isn't the way to avoid this kind of thing?
That AI just controls takeoff and landing.
And if not all the flying, you just have humans there in case there's a catastrophic failure by AI.
Piers, do you want to get in an airplane that doesn't have a pilot in it?
Well, you know what?
Okay, here's my answer.
So I was in Los Angeles a few months ago and they had Waymo, which is not the Musk one, but it's driverless cabs.
And I used one for a week.
And the first time I got in it, it was weird as hell.
So I got in with some of my family and we were all like, it's freaking out.
It's so weird to be in a driverless car around Beverly Hills.
It didn't go out onto main thoroughfares.
It wasn't on the, you know, the 405 freeway or anything.
It just stayed in Beverly Hills.
But it drove around a reasonable click.
It felt increasingly safe the more we used it.
The sensors were very good.
And Elon Musk explained it to me when I talked to him about it, about his own ones that Tesla are rolling out, that there's probably going to be, it's going to be six times as safe statistically as getting into a regular cab.
So it's not like there won't be accidents and it's not like people won't die or that, you know, one or two of these things isn't going to go rogue or whatever, but that your chances of suffering an accident or dying in a driverless cab are likely to be six times safer than if you were in one driven by humans.
So if you apply that logic to a plane, yeah, I mean, maybe why not?
Maybe actually the time to do it is when more and more people start using the driverless cabs and they realize it's safer than human-driven cabs.
I think in the long run, there may be some validity to that.
I just, I think the general public's not going to be comfortable getting in an airplane without a pilot.
Here's why.
When you get on an airplane, you don't look for what the gender of the pilot is or the color of their skin.
You're looking for this, a little bit of gray hair.
And that, I don't think you could ever program that for AI to fully comprehend the experience, the maturity, the judgment of that 30, 40 year pilot up in the front is what really reassures me when I get on an airplane.
Now, in the future, there may be generations after us that are much more comfortable with the technology and they might be up for that sort of thing.
Not me.
I want to see a little bit of gray hair when I get on the airplane.
I mean, AI wouldn't suffer mental health episodes or get depressed if that is indeed what happened here.
I can't argue with that.
But AI also can't cover everything else.
Now, I think you alluded to maybe a combination of, you know, AI is helping to fly the airplane and there's a pilot on board.
Yeah, I'm okay with that.
Honestly, 95% of what I do in the airplane is I just monitor the systems on the airplane.
I'm there in case something goes wrong.
And of course, takeoff and landing.
Not every airport, the airplane land itself.
Will the technology evolve someday for all that to happen?
Yeah, I think it will.
But I don't know that that translates into the general public being comfortable with that.
Maybe my kids' kids will just count me out.
Steve, it'd be fascinating talking to you.
Just finally, do you believe we will get to the bottom of what happened to this plane?
That's a great question.
Here's, you know, if I had two questions to ask, I would ask this.
I'd ask, number one, whoever led this investigation, I'd want to see them behind a microphone and in front of a camera.
That hasn't happened yet, and that's bothering me with this.
And I would like to see them answer questions because this report honestly leaves more questions than answers.
But the first question I would ask is, do you think it's possible that those fuel control switches, both of them too, went from run to cutoff without a human hand moving them to that position?
That's the first question I'd want to get answered.
And the second would be, why did you release the port report at 11.59 p.m. at night just by hitting a button and not getting in front of a microphone?
They need to get in front of a microphone and answer some of these questions, and they haven't up to this point.
I would add a third question, which is if the answer to the first one is yes, then I would want to know, is it at all possible or probable that a pilot of the experienced of the pilots you had on board did that accidentally?
In other words, if it is established that it was a human hand that turned those switches off, and as you say, the data will probably establish that.
Once you get to that point, then the question comes, was it deliberate or accidental?
And I just cannot believe that a pilot with the kind of experience we're talking about would do that accidentally, knowing the consequences of that action.
Especially on takeoff.
This is like when you're at your most alert, you would imagine, and there was no record, they were breathalyzed, there was no alcohol in the system or anything like that.
The Unthinkable Human Error 00:01:38
So you've got clear-headed people who are doing completely inexplicable things if that is what happened.
All of that is true, and it leads us to the most obvious conclusion, which is unthinkable.
It is.
It is unthinkable and very concerning, I think, for everyone who flies, because actually it's the one thing that you have no control over.
You know, you can put pressure on airlines to make the aircraft as safe as possible.
You can invest all the time and training and expense for pilots to be at an absolutely elite level.
But if one of them has a mental health episode, if that is what happened, and does something deliberate like that to crash the plane, there's very little thing you can do about it.
Yeah.
Yep, that's correct.
Captain Steve, what a fascinating interview.
I'm gripped by your YouTube channel.
Congrats on all the success you're having with it.
I can understand why it's so popular now, because you talk in such a matter-of-fact and well-informed way about a very complex issue, which is plane travel.
From your perspective, it's complicated.
From ours, it's frankly often inexplicable.
But you bring it to a very simple way of telling.
And I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
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