South Korea set to order airlines to check Boeing jet fuel switches

By Lisa Barrington

SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea is preparing to order all airlines in the country that operate Boeing jets to examine fuel switches in the focus of an investigation of a deadly Air India crash that killed 260 people.

Fuel switch locks have come under scrutiny after a mention of a 2018 advisory from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in a preliminary report into last month’s crash of Air India’s Boeing 787-8 jet.

A spokesperson for the South Korean transport ministry said the checks were in line with a 2018 advisory from the FAA, but did not give a timeline for inspections.

Boeing referred Reuters’ questions to the FAA, which was not immediately available to comment outside regular hours.

In the Air India crash, the switches had almost simultaneously flipped from run position to cutoff just after takeoff, but the preliminary report did not say how they could have flipped to that position during flight.

The 2018 FAA advisory recommended, but did not mandate, operators of several Boeing models, including the 787, to inspect the locking feature of the fuel cutoff switches to ensure they could not be moved accidentally.

On Sunday, citing a document and sources, Reuters reported that the planemaker and the FAA had privately issued notifications to airlines and regulators that the fuel switch locks on Boeing planes were safe and checks were not required.

The Air India preliminary report said the airline had not carried out the FAA’s suggested inspections as the FAA’s 2018 advisory was not a mandate.

But it also said maintenance records showed that the throttle control module, which includes the fuel switches, was replaced in 2019 and 2023 on the plane involved in the crash.

In an internal memo on Monday, the airline’s CEO, Campbell Wilson, said the investigation into the crash was far from over and it was unwise to jump to premature conclusions, following the release of the preliminary report.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Additional reporting and writing by Abhijith Ganapavaram; Editing by Jamie Freed and Clarence Fernandez)