Air India AI-171 crash: Why pilot Sumeet Sabharwal's father junked probe, moved SC

Calling the probe “dishonest” and “biased”, the father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the deceased pilot of the crashed Air India flight AI-171, along with the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), has moved the Supreme Court, demanding a court-monitored investigation into one of India’s worst air disasters.

The petitioners have sought that a committee, headed by a retired judge of the Supreme court and comprising independent aviation experts, be constituted and this panel supersede the ongoing investigation by the government’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB). They also demanded that the preliminary report of the ongoing probe be treated as closed and all evidence and data transferred to the new judicially-manned body.

In the writ petition, Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, the father of Capt. Sumeet Sabharwal, and the FIP, which comprises over 6,000 professional pilots, have sought a “fair, transparent and technically sound investigation” into the June 12 crash of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in Ahmedabad, which left 229 passengers, 12 crew members and 19 people on the ground dead.

The plea claims that “the official inquiry ordered by AAIB and its preliminary report dated June 15 are both defective and suffer from serious infirmities and perversities”, as they had “implausibly attributed the cause of the crash to pilot error while overlooking other glaring and plausible systemic causes that demand independent scrutiny”.

The petitioners have sought quashing of the ongoing probe, contending that it violates the principle of nemo judex in causa sua (no one is judge in their own case). They claim the five-member probe team “is packed with officers from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and state aviation authorities, whose procedures, oversight and possible lapses are directly implicated in the investigation”. The same officials are effectively investigating themselves, acting under the aegis of the AAIB, which functions under the ministry of civil aviation.

“The rush in forming this team, with investigators and supervising officers from the same state organs whose duties overlap, has led to a biased inquiry that is bound to fail in accurately determining the real cause of the crash,” states the petition.

The writ petition cites “critical contradictions and suppression of systemic causes” in the preliminary report. One of them is the early deployment of the Ram Air Turbine (RAT), a device that automatically unfolds whenever an aircraft experiences complete loss of both normal and back-up electrical power.

“As noted on page 14 of the [preliminary] report, the RAT deployed at take-off before the pilots could have made any control inputs or touched the fuel switches,” the petition states. “This premature activation is an immediate signal of electrical or digital malfunction, contradicting the conclusion drawn by the report that pilot inputs caused loss of power.”

According to the petition, the investigators were unwilling to determine a timeline of events between RAT deployment and crew inputs. It concludes that they “ignored that faults within the Common Core System (CCS), responsible for integrating avionics, flight controls, power distribution and software, may have triggered the sequence of failures”.

Also cited are the failure of the Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT), which never activated, and damage to the Enhanced Aircraft Flight Recorder (EAFR), whose “crash-proof casing melted without soot deposits, consistent with lithium-ion combustion as opposed to fuel fire”.

“The [preliminary] report does not include any analysis or recommendation in respect of this irregularity, demonstrating a lack of scientific rigour and forensic depth,” notes the petition.

Challenging the official explanation that both engines lost thrust because the pilots mistakenly switched fuel controls from RUN to CUTOFF, the petition says such a near-simultaneous response is unlikely under take-off conditions. Instead, it says, “this strongly suggests an automatic or corrupted digital command, not human intervention”.

It is also argued that the investigative team “wrongly concentrated on deceased pilots who cannot defend themselves and refused to investigate or eliminate other potential technical and procedural causes of the crash”.

Another major complaint is the alleged leak of cockpit voice recordings (CVR) to the media in contravention of Rule 17(5) of the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017, which bans public disclosure of such data. The petition says the leak resulted in a “malicious media campaign” and “character assassination of Late Capt. Sumeet Sabharwal”.

The petition adds that excerpts from the CVR were leaked to The Wall Street Journal on July 11, 2025, a day before the official release of findings, which faulted the crew for the crash. “The release of these leaks violates the posthumous reputation of the deceased pilot and infringes the fundamental right to reputation guaranteed under Article 21 [of the Indian Constitution],” the petitioners argue.

They also claim that two persons who said they were from the investigation team had “suddenly and without any prior intimation visited Capt. Sabharwal’s residence in Mumbai on August 30, telling his family that the CVR had accused him”. That behaviour, the filing contends, “serves to confirm the apprehension of a biased and prejudiced investigation leading to uncorroborated blame on a deceased pilot who cannot speak for himself”.

Pointing to previous precedents, such as the court of inquiry following the 2010 Mangalore air crash, the petition urges the Supreme Court’s intervention “to restore public confidence in aviation safety”. It argues that only a “judicially supervised, expert-led investigation, independent of the regulators, will be capable of providing a full, open and credible determination” of what caused this tragedy.

The petition concludes: “Aborted and partial, a biased investigation undermines not only aviation safety and public confidence, but principles of justice and fairness. Only with a court-monitored, expert-led investigation can accountability be sustained and the recurrence of such monumental failures be avoided”.

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