Dreamliner accident

It seems really shocking that in an aircraft costing around $300 million, there is no inter-locking of the fuel-switch with aircraft engines?

That is to say, the aircraft engine cannot be started without the fuel switch in on position and once the aircraft engines have started, the fuel switch cannot be switched off, without first switching off the engines.

With engines running, there may be a provision to switch off the fuel, only in an emergency with some suitable system (designed as per aircraft manual) like we see in fire-alarms.

This advice may seem odd, from a person having no experience in aircraft designing, but if there was some such system/inter-locking, there could not have been an accident like that of the Dreamliner, where 260 people had to lose their lives, prematurely, due to fuel-switch being in an off position while the aircraft was in the air.

Uday Garg,

by email