Nobody can blame pilot, says Supreme Court on Air India crash

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday termed “unfortunate” the Air India crash in June in Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, and observed that nobody could blame the pilot for the crash. A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi said, “no one in India believes it was the pilot’s fault”.

The top court also issued notices to the Centre, DGCA and others on a plea filed by the father of late Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who was the Pilot-in-Command of the Air India pilot in a London-bound flight from Ahmedabad, seeking a retired judge-monitored fair, transparent, and technically sound probe into the crash of Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft.

Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for the petitioner, told the bench that the current investigation being conducted by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) was not independent. He raised concerns that the pilot might be unfairly blamed for the accident.

“It’s extremely unfortunate that this crash took place, but you (father) should not carry this burden that your son is being blamed… Nobody can blame him (Pilot) for anything,” Justice Kant said.

Justice Bagchi also said that there was no insinuation against the pilot in the preliminary AAIB report. “One pilot asked whether the fuel was cut off by the other, the other said no. There is no suggestion of fault in that report”, the judge said.

A petitioner’s counsel said that the Wall Street Journal has carried an article based on the investigation, and suggested pilot error by citing an unnamed Indian government source.

To this, the bench replied that it is “not bothered by foreign reports”. “That is nasty reporting. No one in India believes it was the pilot’s fault,” said the bench. The top court then posted the matter for hearing on November 10.

Pushkaraj Sabharwal (91)and Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) had filed the plea seeking the constitution of a judicially monitored committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge and with independent experts from the aviation sector as its members.

The plea had 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)