Nearly five months after a devastating plane crash in India that claimed 260 lives, the ensuing investigation has been embroiled in controversy, now involving the country’s Supreme Court.
Flight 171, destined for London, departed from Ahmedabad in western India on June 12th. Tragically, it crashed into a building a mere 32 seconds after takeoff.
While an interim report was issued in July, it has faced criticism for allegedly focusing disproportionately on the actions of the pilots, potentially overshadowing a possible mechanical fault with the aircraft.
On Friday, a justice of India’s Supreme Court asserted that no blame should be attributed to the aircraft’s captain.
This statement followed remarks made a week prior by the airline’s chief executive, who insisted that the aircraft was not experiencing any issues.
During a panel discussion at the Aviation India 2025 summit in New Delhi in late October, Air India’s CEO, Cambell Wilson, acknowledged that the accident had been “absolutely devastating for the people involved, for the families of those involved, and the staff”.
However, he emphasized that preliminary investigations by Indian officials, summarized in an initial report, had “indicated that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft, the engines or the operation of the airline”.
He further noted that while Air India is cooperating with investigators, it is not directly involved in the investigation process.
As the accident occurred within India’s borders, the country’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is leading the investigation. However, due to the aircraft and its engines being designed and manufactured in the United States, US officials are also participating.
A month after the incident, the AAIB released a preliminary report. This is a standard practice in major accident investigations and aims to provide a summary of the known facts at the time of publication.
The report typically incorporates information gathered from the crash site examination, as well as basic data retrieved from the flight data recorder. It generally refrains from drawing firm conclusions about the cause of the accident.
However, the 15-page report on Air India 171 has sparked controversy, largely due to the content of two specific paragraphs.
The report notes that seconds after takeoff, the fuel cutoff switches – normally used during engine startup before a flight and shutdown afterward – were moved from the “run” position to the cutoff position.
This action would have cut off fuel to the engines, causing them to rapidly lose thrust. Although the switches were moved back to restart the engines, it was too late to avert the disaster.
The report further states: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.”
This indirectly reported exchange has ignited intense speculation regarding the roles of the two pilots, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and his first officer Clive Kunder, who was piloting the plane at the time.
Robert Sumwalt, former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, suggested that the report indicated “this was not a problem with the airplane or the engines”.
“Did somebody deliberately shut down the fuel, or was it somehow or another a slip that they inadvertently shut off the fuel?” he questioned during an interview with CBS.
Indian aviation safety consultant Capt. Mohan Ranganathan strongly implied that pilot suicide could have been a factor in the accident, in an interview with NDTV.
“I don’t want to use the word. I’ve heard the pilot had some medical history and… it can happen,” he stated.
Mike Andrews, a lawyer representing victims’ families, believes that the manner in which information has been released has “led people unfairly and inappropriately to blame those pilots without all the information”.
“An aircraft like this – that is so complex – has so many things that could go wrong,” he explains.
“To seize upon those two very small, decontextualised pieces of information, and automatically blame pilots for suicide and mass murder… is unfair and wrong.”
This sentiment is echoed by Capt. Amit Singh, founder of the Safety Matters Foundation, an India-based organization dedicated to promoting a safety culture in aviation.
He has produced a report asserting that the available evidence “strongly supports the theory of an electrical disturbance as the primary cause of the engine shutdown” that led to the disaster.
He suggests that an electrical fault may have triggered the Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC), a computerized system that manages the engines, to initiate a shutdown by cutting off the fuel supply.
He posits that the flight data recorder may have registered the command to shut off the fuel supply, rather than any physical movement of the cutoff switches in the cockpit.
In other words, the switches themselves may not have been touched until the pilots attempted to restart the engines.
Capt. Singh has also challenged the conduct of the investigation in India’s Supreme Court.
He told the BBC that the framing of the preliminary report was biased because it “appears to suggest pilot error, without disclosing all the technical anomalies that occurred during the flight”.
The Supreme Court has also commented on the issue.
The court has been reviewing a petition filed by Pushkarraj Sabharwal, the father of Capt. Sumeet Sabharwal. The 91-year-old is seeking an independent judicial inquiry into the tragedy.
“It’s extremely unfortunate, this crash, but you should not carry this burden that your son is being blamed. Nobody can blame him for anything,” Justice Surya Kant told him.
A further hearing is scheduled for November 10th.
The theory that an electrical fault could have caused the accident is supported by the US-based Foundation for Aviation Safety (FAS).
The organization’s founder, Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing, has previously been critical of safety standards at the US aerospace giant.
He believes the preliminary report was “woefully inadequate… embarrassingly inadequate”.
His organization has dedicated time to examining reports of electrical issues on board 787s, including water leaks into wiring bays, which have been previously noted by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Authority. Concerns have also been voiced in some other quarters.
“There were so many of what we consider electrical oddities on that plane, that for them to come out and to all intents and purposes direct the blame to the pilots without exhaustively going through and examining potential system failures, we just thought was flat out wrong,” he says.
He believes there was a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the plane and onto the pilots.
The FAS has called for wholesale reform of current international air accident investigation procedures, citing “outdated protocols, conflicts of interest and systemic failures that endanger public trust and delay life-saving safety improvements”.
Mary Schiavo, an attorney and former inspector general at the US Department of Transportation, disagrees that the pilots have been deliberately put under the spotlight.
She believes the preliminary report was flawed, but only because investigators were under intense pressure to provide information, with worldwide attention focused on them.
“I think they were just in a hurry, because this was a horrific accident and the whole world was watching. They were just in a hurry to push something out,” she says.
“Then, in my opinion, the whole world jumped to conclusions and right away was saying, ‘this is pilot suicide, this was intentional’.”
“If they had to do it over again, I don’t think they would have put those little snippets from the cockpit voice recording in,” she says.
Her own view is that “a computer or mechanical failure… is the most likely scenario”.
International regulations for air accident investigations stipulate that a final report should be issued within 12 months of the event, although this is not always adhered to. Until the final report is published, the true causes of the accident will remain unknown.
A former air accident investigator who spoke to the BBC emphasized the importance of “keeping an open mind” until the investigation process has been completed.
Boeing has consistently maintained that the 787 is a safe aircraft, and it does have a strong safety record.
The company informed the BBC that it would defer to India’s AAIB to provide information regarding the investigation.
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