AI171 crash: Pilot's father approaches Supreme Court demanding independent and fair probe

New Delhi [India], October 16 (ANI): Father of late Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who was the Pilot-in-Command of the Air India pilot in a June crash in Ahmedabad that killed 241 people, has approached the Supreme Court seeking a retired judge-monitored fair, transparent, and technically sound probe into the crash of Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft.
Pushkaraj Sabharwal, aged 91, alongside the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), filed a petition urging the court to constitute a judicially monitored inquiry committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge and comprising independent aviation experts.
The plea said the probe presently being undertaken by the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and the preliminary report dated June 15 submitted pursuant to that investigation, are "defective and suffer from serious infirmities and perversities".
It sought directions that all prior investigations conducted by the DGCA into the accident, including the preliminary report dated July 12, be treated as closed and all relevant materials, data, and records be transferred to the judicially monitored committee or court of inquiry.
"Respondents have conducted a perfunctory, biased, and technically deficient investigation into the crash of Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner (VT-ANB), ignoring critical inconsistencies, material evidence, and plausible systemic causes, thereby undermining the credibility of the inquiry. The hasty and unfounded attribution of the crash to pilot error, without corroborative evidence or comprehensive technical analysis, renders the investigation arbitrary, perverse, and violative of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India," the plea stated.
It said that the preliminary report suffers from "serious technical defects and omissions" which render its conclusions unreliable.
It fails to analyse the significance of the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployment, neglects to investigate potential failure of Boeing's Common Core System (CCS), and offers no adequate explanation for the simultaneous loss of multiple redundant safety and data systems--factors indicative of a systemic electrical collapse rather than human error, it added.
The petition further said that the report's conclusion attributing causation to pilot error is inherently implausible and contrary to recorded data, as the RAT deployment occurred before any manual pilot input.
"The failure to correlate crew control inputs with RAT extension demonstrates non-application of mind and suppression of material facts, thereby violating the mandate of fair, rational, and evidence-based investigation guaranteed under Article 14," it further stated.
The investigation has failed to examine or rule out design-level or software integration failures within the Boeing 787's CCS, despite expert warnings regarding cascading and common-mode failures, said the plea.
It further added, "The omission to conduct independent software forensic analysis or fault-injection testing vitiates the integrity of the findings and defeats the purpose of an independent technical inquiry envisaged under Annexe 13 of the Chicago Convention." (ANI)