AI-171: A year on, no cause, no closure

THe Aircraft stroke investigating Bureau (AAIB) is expected to give up a position update on fri on its investigation into the crash of Air India flight 171, nearly a year after the accident, according to officials who asked not to be named. But the document will not establish what brought the aircraft down, with the examination of its engines still underway.By their account, the update will set out the work completed so far and the areas still under examination, and little beyond that. What it might stop short of doing is settle the question that lies at the heart of the issue: whether the fuel to both engines was cut by human hand or by a fault in the aircraft. That question has split investigators, pilots and lawyers since the first weeks of the inquiry.“It is essentially an update that investigating authorities are expected to provide when a final report cannot be released within a year,” a ministry official said, and added that the update was not, strictly, even a status or interim report. “It will provide a sense of where the investigation stands and the work that has been completed. But it should not be seen as a document that will establish the cause of the accident.”Under Annex 13 of the International Civil Aviation Organization, a State must publish a final report within a year of an accident or, failing that, issue a progress update; the document is shared with international stakeholders, the official said.The Federation of Indian Pilots on Thursday urged the civil aviation ministry not to issue the update at all, warning it will deepen the confusion rather than ease it. A member of the All India Pilots’ Association put the objection plainly: the AAIB’s single sentence on the cockpit transcript, in last year’s preliminary report, was enough to set off a run of theories — most of them alleging human intervention — and a fresh update that again stops short of the cause will only feed more.What is known is this. AI-171 lifted off from Ahmedabad a little after lunchtime on June 12 last year, bound for London Gatwick with 242 people aboard. In the last of the roughly thirty seconds it stayed in the air, the cockpit voice recorder caught one pilot asking the other why they cut off fuel to engine; and the other said he hadn’t. “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,” the AAIB preliminary report released in July stated.Both engines lost power and the Boeing 787-8 came down onto the hostel canteen of BJ Medical College, where students were eating. The crash killed 241 of the 242 on board and 19 people on the ground. One passenger survived. The preliminary report, published a month later, recorded the cockpit exchange and went no further — no cause named, neither voice identified. The investigation remains open.With no formal explanation, families of the dead have had little choice but to fix on one theory or the other. “There are different versions, but no clear answer,” said Muktiben Vansadiya, who lost both her parents. They had never been on a plane before; the flight to the UK, to see her elder sister, was their first. A man from her village of Kosamba who had been on the aircraft’s earlier leg into Ahmedabad told the family there had been technical trouble on it, she said, and she wants to know what was checked before it was cleared to fly on. “We still do not know what exactly happened,” she told HT from Surat. The contest over what happened has run, from the start, outward from that one exchange on the recorder. On one side are the pilots’ representatives, who have argued from the first weeks that the crew is being made to answer for a fault in the aircraft. On the other are Western investigators: according to an account in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, experts with access to the black-box data concluded that the captain “almost certainly” moved both fuel switches from run to cutoff in the seconds after takeoff, while the first officer, who was flying the aircraft, tried to recover it. The same reporting described sustained friction between the Indian and American sides over how the inquiry was run — at one point, the US National Transportation Safety Board is said to have weighed pulling out of the investigation altogether.The pilots’ side has not let that reading stand. The Federation of Indian Pilots, which represents more than 5,400 members and has already gone to the Supreme Court for a judicial probe, used a press conference on the eve of the anniversary to press the demand again, arguing the inquiry has leaned too readily towards the crew. “The Western media immediately built a suicide theory around a brief cockpit transcript,” its president, C S Randhawa, said. “It is too premature to blame the pilots.”Mike Andrews of the Beasley Allen law firm in the United States, acting for more than 150 victims, pointed to the early deployment of the Ram Air Turbine — an emergency device that spins up only on total loss of engine power — as a sign of a possible technical fault. “If the cause was clear, there would be no delay in the report,” he said.No one will say when the final report will come. The last outstanding step is an examination of the engines by GE Aerospace at its facility in Ohio, and officials have said the report cannot be issued until it is done. While the cause stays open, families have been asked to treat the matter as closed. HT has seen a Receipt, Discharge and Indemnity form offered as part of Air India’s final compensation, under which ₹35 lakh — ₹25 lakh already paid in interim relief plus a further ₹10 lakh — is treated as full and final. Signing it releases not only Air India but Boeing, General Electric, GE Aerospace, Safran, Honeywell, government agencies and the airport operator from liability, and binds the family to indemnify them against any future claim — before any finding has established what those parties did or failed to do. Air India said on Wednesday that the offer carried no deadline, and was open to all families who preferred not to wait for the investigation.A year on, the site still carries the marks. The four Atulyam hostel buildings stand vacant and dark, their walls soot-blackened and cracked, windows broken, the trees in the compound bare and burnt. Grass has grown over debris no one has cleared. Ashaben Parmar, a ragpicker who works the ground nearby, still turns up fragments of the aircraft on her daily rounds; standing by the worst-hit building, she pulls twisted lengths of aluminium from her sack. She had been inside the campus minutes before the crash and stepped away to a water stall seconds before the aircraft came down. Those seconds, she said, saved her life. The toll on the ground — 19 dead — would have been far worse but for a clearing drive weeks earlier that had moved 40 to 50 families out of the area. The Gujarat government now plans to demolish the buildings and rebuild the complex at a cost of ₹103 crore, ₹53 crore of it from the Tata Group.Among the dead was Vijay Rupani, the former Gujarat chief minister, who was flying to London for a puja; his wife had already reached, and the family had spoken to him not long before the flight. His son Rushabh said they trust the investigation and have urged others to wait for its findings.“When you have an umbrella, it protects you from everything,” he said. “Once it is gone, you are exposed.”