The early phase of the investigation into the fatal Air India Flight 171 crash was marked by sharp tensions between Indian and American authorities, including a standoff over where the aircraft’s black boxes should be analysed.
The June 12 crash killed 260 people, all but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and 19 on the ground, when the aircraft plunged into a hostel for medical students in Ahmedabad shortly after take-off. It was the first fatal accident involving the Dreamliner.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the friction escalated in late June when Indian officials asked American black-box specialists to take a late-night military flight to a remote laboratory in Korwa, likely referring to the Uttar Pradesh town. Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), blocked the plan due to State Department warnings about terrorism and military conflict in the region.
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The report said Homendy made urgent calls to US transportation secretary Sean Duffy and the chief executives of Boeing and GE Aerospace. At her request, State Department officials intercepted the NTSB recorder specialists at Delhi airport.
Homendy then issued an ultimatum: unless Indian authorities chose New Delhi or Washington as the site for analysing the recorders within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support. India subsequently agreed to have the recorders decoded in New Delhi using specialised NTSB equipment, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter and internal documents.
Disagreements over possible cause
The Journal report said the investigation has exposed deeper rifts between the two countries over the crash’s likely cause. American government and industry officials privately believe evidence points to Captain Sumeet Sabharwal deliberately crashing the aircraft, though no official conclusion has been reached.
Indian pilots’ associations, aviation authorities and the Supreme Court have cautioned against drawing premature conclusions about the pilots’ actions.
A preliminary report from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) found that the aircraft’s fuel switches “were transitioned from run to cutoff, one after another at an interval of one second.”
The Journal also described new purported clues from cockpit voice recordings: the captain remained calm, while the first officer appeared to panic, exclaiming in alarm during the final moments. According to the report, Sabharwal did not attempt to pull back on the yoke, while First Officer Clive Kunder did so just before impact.
Patrick Lusch, the FAA’s lead investigator, wrote in a LinkedIn comment — later deleted — that the final ten seconds of the flight “will be argued, debated, studied, and scrutinised for decades to come,” the Journal reported.
Communication gaps and investigative strain
At one point, GVG Yugandhar, head of India’s AAIB, pushed back against US concerns, telling American investigators, “we’re not a Third World country” and “we can do anything you all can do,” according to people cited by the Journal.
Indian officials favoured working at the Korwa facility due to its technical capacity and concerns that decoding in New Delhi would draw media attention. They also pursued certain investigative steps sequentially rather than concurrently, frustrating US officials who saw the black-box readout as urgent to determine any broader safety risks.
Days passed without the data being downloaded. “We’re champing at the bit to get the data,” one FAA official said at the time, according to the Journal.
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The report also detailed communication difficulties: Homendy’s attempts to reach Yugandhar reportedly went unanswered, and an NTSB effort to arrange a virtual meeting fell through when the Indian official did not join the call.
Indian authorities did not respond to queries from the Journal regarding these accounts.
