NEARLY five months after a plane crash in India which killed 260 people, the investigation has become mired in controversy, with the country’s Supreme Court the latest to weigh in.
Flight 171 was en route to London from Ahmedabad in western India on 12 June. It crashed into a building just 32 seconds after taking off.
An interim report was released in July, but critics argue it unfairly focused on the actions of the pilots, diverting attention away from a possible fault with the aircraft.
On Friday, a judge in India’s Supreme Court insisted that nobody could blame the aircraft’s captain.
His comments came a week after the airline’s boss insisted there was no problem with the aircraft.
During a panel discussion at the Aviation India 2025 summit in New Delhi in late October, Air India’s chief executive Cambell Wilson admitted that the accident had been “absolutely devastating for the people involved, for the families of those involved, and the staff”.
But he stressed that initial investigations by Indian officials, summed up in a preliminary report, had “indicated that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft, the engines or the operation of the airline”.
A month after the accident, the AAIB published a preliminary report. This is standard procedure in major accident investigations and is meant to provide a summary of the known facts at the time of publication.
However, the 15-page report into Air India 171 has proved controversial. This is largely due to the contents of two short paragraphs.
First, it notes that seconds after takeoff, the fuel cutoff switches – normally used when starting the engines before a flight and shutting them down afterwards, had been moved from the “run” to the cutoff position.
This would have deprived the engines of fuel, causing them to lose thrust rapidly. The switches were moved back to restart the engines, but too late to prevent the disaster.
It then says: “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.”
That indirectly-reported exchange sparked intense speculation about the role of the two pilots, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and his first officer Clive Kunder, who was flying the plane at the time.
A former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Robert Sumwalt, claimed the report showed “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 said during an interview with the US network CBS.
BBC
