Ahmedabad: Four months after the horrific Air India crash in Ahmedabad killed all but one of 242 people on board flight AI-171 and 19 others on ground, the father of late Captain Sumeet Sabharwal has moved the Supreme Court seeking a judicially-monitored inquiry into the accident.
The 91-year-old Pushkaraj Sabharwal, whose son Captain Sumeet was one of the two pilots of the ill-fated Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner which crashed 30 seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad en route to London Gatwick, has filed a writ petition along with Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking closure of the probe by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB).
The writ petition, filed on October 10 under Article 32 of the Constitution, has asked for a committee to be constituted, headed by a retired Supreme Court judge and comprising independent aviation experts, to conduct a fair and transparent inquiry into the crash.
The petition alleges that the preliminary report prepared by the AAIB is “defective, biased and incomplete,” as it attributes cause of the accident to pilot error and disregards technical and systemic factors.
The pilot’s 91-year-old father and FIP — consisting of over 6,000 pilots — have requested that the current probe be set aside and all records be transferred to a judicially monitored committee as only an independent, experts-led probe can ensure accountability, restore public confidence, and prevent recurrence of such tragedies.
The petition points out that Captain Sumeet, with over 30 years of incident-free flying and more than 15,000 flight hours, was among the most experienced pilots, and that the ongoing probe has been prejudiced against the deceased pilot, who is unable to defend himself. Such a one-sided probe tarnishes his reputation and poses a threat to public safety by failing to identify the true cause of the crash, the petition states.
Pointing to multiple inconsistencies in the preliminary report, the petition also questions its finding of both engine fuel control switches moved from “RUN” to “CUTOFF” within a second, describing such synchronised manual movement as “implausible under take-off conditions.”
Capt. Sumeet’s father had earlier written to the Civil Aviation Secretary and Director General of AAIB demanding a formal investigation under Rule 12 of the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017.
