Boeing Crash: A Call for the Right to Transparency

The catastrophic crash of Air India Flight AI-171 in Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025, which claimed the lives of 241 people on the aircraft and 19 people on the ground, raising the death toll to 260 people, not only depicts the Indian aviation ecosystem’s failure but also the erosion of human rights. This tragic incident was a major blow to the right to life, the right to truth and transparency, and the right to an effective remedy.

The aircraft reached an approximate height of 625 feet above mean sea level and an airspeed of 180 knots while still on the runway. It lasted for a mere 30 to 32 seconds from take-off, after which it plummeted into the densely populated residential area. Both the pilots, Sumeet Sabharwal (experience of nearly 8,600 flight hours) and Clive Kunder (experience of 1,100 flight hours), were reportedly well rested.

The recent preliminary report, released by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), revealed that the fuel cutoff switches for both of the engines "transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec". These control switches are protected by a metal lock built around them to prevent them from unintended flipping. The report also states, “one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cut off. The other pilot responded that he did not do so”. The pilots tried to revive the engines; however, only one of them showed some signs of recovery, while the other failed to recover. 

While aircraft had valid airworthiness certificate and no recorded history of fuel control issues as per the report, however, it revealed that Air India didn’t carry out 2018 optional Service Bulletin advising checks on the fuel control switch locking mechanisms in the Boeing airplanes, issued by US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for Boeing Company’s certain models including the one that met with the accident. This shifted the attention of the investigation from the possible human error by the pilots to the safety oversight and airline maintenance. Pilot union even criticised the investigation’s alleged bias towards pilot culpability, which overshadows the deep-seated issues with the aircraft design or its safety mechanisms. 

The fact that it took a disastrous accident putting an end to the lives of 260 people for the “optional” fuel control switch locking mechanism to be made mandatory by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and that this accident could have been averted by adequate risk assessment mechanisms raises fundamental questions about DGCA’s risk assessment standards. India’s constitution grants the fundamental Right to Life under Article 21, a right that includes the guarantee of safety and protection from state and corporate negligence. This is not a mere aviation oversight, but a huge breach and omission on the part of the state to protect the right to life by ensuring rigorous safety standards. 

While India’s aviation sector has seen exponential growth, becoming one of the fastest-growing aviation sectors at the global level, this incident raises critical concerns about the safety and the overall oversight mechanisms. This piece scales the aviation landscape in India and makes a compelling case for large-scale structural reform, seeking more accountability and transparency.

The Aircraft Act, 1934, serves as the enabling statute and cornerstone of India’s aviation law jurisprudence. Section 5 empowers the Central Government to make rules with respect to certification of airworthiness, licensing of aviation personnel, and regulations for securing the safety of aircraft operations. Section 7 further grants the government the power to “make rules for investigation of accidents,” and this is in the light of this section that the AAIB was established. Part VI of the Aircraft Rules, 1937, concerns “Airworthiness,” which plays a paramount role in aviation safety and lays down requirements of proper documents. Air India’s failure to implement the optional Boeing Advisory should have been scrutinised under the safety standards laid down in these rules, but the accident lays bare the gulf between the written framework of law and the practical implementation at the ground level.

The aviation sector in India is regulated by the trinity of the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA), the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB). MoCA is the nodal ministry that administers the Aircraft Act and the functioning of bodies like AAIB and DGCA. This is another contentious issue, as the regulator and the investigator are under the same bureaucratic umbrella that governs the entire aviation industry. AAIB was the result of efforts of aviation in India to align with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO’s) best practices and was established in 2012 to conduct impartial investigations into aircraft accidents. 

This accident can be weighed against two fundamental rights of the victims: the right to transparency and truth, and the right to redress. AAIB was created to establish an independent body to impartially investigate the accidents. DGCA was not given this responsibility as the same entity that has authorized the aircraft and sanctioned all the licenses cannot then investigate the accident without the inherent conflict of interest. But this can at best be categorized as the case of “illusion of independence” because even though the AAIB works separately from DGCA, it works under the MoCA and receives all the funds from there. Recently, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture raised the issue of “modest” funding and “a distinct imbalance in the allocation of funds across key aviation bodies”. AAIB received 20 crore rupees in funding for investigating air crashes. The report also stressed that 53% of the sanctioned posts in DGCA lie vacant, revealing its understaffed status. This violated the rights of the victims’ families to know the full truth about the incident that led to the loss of the lives of their dear ones. The investigation should necessarily be carried out independently and transparently, but as things stand, institutional arrangement creates a conflict of interest that directly undermines the independence of crash investigations.

Rule 5 of the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017, lays down the sole objective of the investigation of accidents to be their prevention and “not to apportion blame or liability” to encourage open disclosure by the parties involved. But the ground reality is that these AAIB reports are often used as evidence by the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to impose criminal liability on the parties involved, incentivizing the stakeholders to conceal the relevant information instead. Ultimately, the pilots have to face the wrath of penalties and punishments as they are unable to defend themselves and become convenient scapegoats, and the case is closed without investigating the deeper problems, such as systemic failures in airlines, manufacturers, and the regulatory bodies.

Even during investigation into the 2010 crash of Air India Express Flight 812 in Mangalore, which killed 158 people, the blame was put solely on the pilot who was reportedly suffering from sleep inertia after a long in-flight sleep, ignoring other crucial contributory factors like concrete structure for the ILS localizer antenna at the end of the runway which did not comply with the mandated requirements. It was also recommended “that the initial actions should include video recording of the wreckage for better understanding of the situation, while the rescue operations are underway.” This depicts how the pilots are singled out, and the failure of the broader ecosystem goes unnoticed. 

The aviation expert Sanjay Lazar stated that the preliminary report “raises more questions than it answers. There are a lot of gaps, which might be filled once the investigation goes further.” He also raised concerns with the partial release of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) transcript and the last line of the report, which says that there were no safety recommendations for Boeing or General Electric. The fact that the accident cost the lives of 260 people and still there are no suggested or directive measures to improve the situation is quite disturbing and raises concerns. The Airline Pilots’ Association of India’s (ALPA-India) President, San Thomas, stressed the absence of AAIB officials’ signatures on it and demanded transparency and involvement in the investigation panel.

The accident calls for a major structural overhaul, from apportioning blame to a deeper investigation into the systemic and technical errors, encouraging greater transparency in line with Rule 5 of the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017. AAIB must also be moved out of the umbrella of MoCA and reconstituted as a completely independent body so that the families’ right to know the truth by way of a thorough investigation by an independent body is not compromised. All the optional service checks should be reclassified as mandatory by the DGCA, as jeopardising the lives of lakhs of people who rely on Indian aviation every single day constitutes a gross violation of their right to life under Article 21. While the preliminary report has been released in a very haphazard manner, the next report should be more elaborate and not a source of confusion and unnecessary blame game. Indian judiciary must also step in to oversee the overall investigation and ensure that proper relief is granted to victims’ families.