The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is expected to release a status update on Friday 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,
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.
Also Read: Pilots’ body opposes interim report on AI171 crash, demands judicial probe
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.”
Neha LM Tripathi is a Special Correspondent with the National Political Bureau of Hindustan Times. She covers the aviation and railways ministries, and also writes on travel trends. Her work spans national developments, with a focus on policy, people, and the evolving travel landscape. She has 13 years of experience. Before moving to Delhi, she was based in Mumbai, where she began her journey as a journalist. Outside the newsroom, Neha enjoys trekking and travelling.
He is an Ahmedabad-based journalist with more than two decades of experience. His career spans business journalism and general news, with reporting across politics, crime, governance, public policy, business, industry, infrastructure, energy, ports, aviation, the environment, wildlife and social issues. He began his career in feature writing before moving into business journalism, reporting on companies and sectors including energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, automobiles and real estate. Over the years, his work expanded to politics, courts, crime, public policy, civic affairs, the environment and wildlife. His reporting has taken him from government offices and courtrooms to factory floors, ports, forests and remote villages, covering stories that range from industrial investments and financial markets to elections, conservation and issues affecting everyday life. While many assignments demand the pace of the daily news cycle, others require sustained reporting over months and years to follow developments beyond the headlines. He started his journalism career with the Asian Age in Ahmedabad in 2002 as a feature writer and sub-editor. Since 2022, he has been working with Hindustan Times. Earlier, he worked with Business Standard, DNA, The Economic Times, Mint and The Times of India. His longest stint was with Mint, where he spent more than eight years reporting across multiple beats. During his career, he has worked in both reporting and editing roles, contributing to page planning, local editions and special editorial projects as newsrooms evolved from print-first operations to digital publishing. Early in his career, he also worked on media and documentary projects with an NGO and as a copywriter at a communications agency before returning to journalism. Away from work, he sometimes makes time for a pair of binoculars, table tennis, cinema and the occasional poem.