Almost 400 comments and no avherald link for reference?
Still quite early in the investigation, and so many things to consider. I don't know why online communities have been so quick to gravitate towards the murder/suicide theory. I thought aviation enthusiasts of all people would want to keep an open mind until every other possibility is ruled out, however minuscule it might seem.
What the bbc says is truncated and omits the info about the failing part, so people can point towards murder suicide because they don't have all the info.
Which is why you should always read avherald first...
The fuel cutoff switches are of a similar design to the 737 and most other Boeing aircraft. A failure in that design seems less likely than the most charitable explanation, that the copilot inadvertently went into the wrong mode of muscle memory.
The interim report does mention the SIAB NM-18-33. If you read that document it specifically says that the fuel cut-offs were installed with the locking feature deactivated on some 737 aircraft. It's a pretty big leap to that causing this incident. Someone or some thing would still need to have touched the switches to move them.
... which is more than the bbc one paragraph news item does?
Air India was government owned company till 2020s when it was sold back to the TATA group from whom it was originally nationalized from in the 1960s.
Stakeholders like regulators, employees individually could have different PoV or interests in the change .
Regulatory leadership could just as easily want to prove why this de nationalization was bad if so inclined as they could be for not wanting embarrass the flag carrier.
So it would be hard to categorically say that regulator has vested interest in protecting the flag carrier
Because the hardware failure theories seem preposterously far-fetched and require an unnecessary multiplication of deities.
Your ghost in the machine needs to be “just so” so that it can cause both switches to be read in “cutoff” nearly simultaneously. Then, 10 seconds later one of the switches needs to be read in “run”, then 4 seconds after that the second one needs to read “run”. You also need to explain why there have been zero single engine failures of this type before this double failure.
The ghost also needs to explain why one pilot asked the other “why did you cutoff?” instead of something like “what happened to the engines?” (which is the more natural response, unless you already know the switches are in cutoff).
I personally don't buy it. Why then did the switches just work after being toggled. Why did the switches go to shutoff one after the other. Why did the pilot question why the other pilot set it to shutoff? Then there's the catastrophic nature of the timing, 10 seconds earlier and they would have skidded off the runway. 10 seconds later, the engines would've relit and regained enough thrust. If there's one thing pilots are experts in, it's what to do to get yourself killed in your airframe of choice. This was calculated down to the second.
Something else that's going on, there's a bot network alive and well on twitter blaiming boeing and all things under the sun except pilot mass murder. Yet occams razor, a mentally ill pilot shut off the fuel at the right time to doom the aircraft seems tragically possible.
If they had a credible indication of a technical failure that causes engines to randomly shut down, they would have already grounded 787 fleets, which hasn't happened.
[1] https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/NM-18-33.pdf
[2] https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/187/honeywell_hwscs06627_...