Tensions marked US, India Air India crash probe: Report

THe investigating into the lifelessly broadcast bharat flight of steps 171 crash began with significant tensions between Indian and American authorities, including a dramatic standoff over where the blackboxes should be accessed, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.The crash on June 12 killed 260 people, including all but one of the 242 people aboard the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 19 on the ground when the aircraft plummeted into a hostel for medical students in Ahmedabad shortly after takeoff. It was the first fatal crash involving the Dreamliner.The friction came to a head in late June when Indian officials wanted American black-box specialists to take a late-night military flight to a remote laboratory in Korwa, according to the Journal. While the report did not detail the state, the reference could be to the town in Uttar Pradesh. Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, blocked the plan over security concerns related to State Department warnings about terrorism and military conflicts in the region, the report stated.Queries to the government went unanswered.Homendy made urgent calls to transportation secretary Sean Duffy and the chief executives of Boeing and GE Aerospace, the newspaper reported. At her request, state department officials intercepted the NTSB recorder specialists at the Delhi airport.The NTSB chairwoman then issued an ultimatum: If Indian authorities didn’t choose between New Delhi and Washington as a location within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support from the investigation, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Journal.Indian authorities relented and agreed to analyse the flight recorders in New Delhi using specialised equipment provided by the NTSB, the newspaper reported, citing interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the probe and internal documents.The investigation has exposed deeper rifts between the two nations over the crash’s likely cause, according to the Journal. American government and industry officials privately believe the evidence points to Captain Sumeet Sabharwal deliberately crashing the aircraft, though no official conclusion has been reached.Indian pilots associations, authorities and the Supreme Court have cautioned against making any judgment on either of the pilot’s culpability.According to the preliminary report released by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) – the independent agency probing the crash -- flight recorder data showed the fuel switches “were transitioned from run to cutoff, one after another at an interval of one second”.The Journal report claimed new purported clues from cockpit voice recordings. Voice recorders revealed the captain remained calm while the first officer seemed to panic, exclaiming “Oh s—!” in the final moments, according to people familiar with an air-traffic control recording cited by the newspaper. Data also showed Sabharwal didn’t pull back on the aircraft’s yoke in the final moments, while First Officer Clive Kunder did pull up at the end, the report stated.“These 10 seconds will be argued, debated, studied, and scrutinised for decades to come,” Patrick Lusch, the FAA’s lead investigator in the probe, said in a LinkedIn comment that was later deleted, according to the report.At the height of the tensions, GVG Yugandhar, chief of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, emphasised his agency’s capabilities early in the probe, telling American investigators “we’re not a Third World country” and “we can do anything you all can do,” according to people familiar with his remarks cited by the Journal.Indian officials believed a facility in Korwa had more capabilities and expressed concern that the New Delhi facility would attract media attention. They also proceeded with certain aspects of the probe sequentially rather than concurrently, frustrating American investigators who prioritised downloading black-box data to determine if a broader safety threat existed.Days stretched on after the crash without a black-box readout. “We’re champing at the bit to get the data,” one FAA official in Washington said at the time, according to the Journal.Homendy attempted to reach Yugandhar for updates on the black boxes, but her attempt went unanswered, the newspaper reported. The NTSB also tried to set up a virtual meeting between Yugandhar and a US safety official, but the Indian official didn’t log on.