AI pilot’s father moves SC, seeks fair probe into crash

The father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal — the pilot who died in the June 12 crash of Air India flight AI171 in Ahmedabad — and the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) have moved the Supreme Court seeking a court-monitored probe into the accident in which 265 people, including both pilots and crew members, died.

Filed under Article 32 of the Constitution by Pushkaraj Sabharwal and the FIP, the petition seeks a court-monitored committee comprising a retired judge of the Supreme Court and independent aviation and technical experts to conduct a fair, transparent and technically robust probe into the crash.

It urged the top court to direct that all investigations carried out so far, including the preliminary report dated July 12, be treated as closed and all records, data and evidence be transferred to the new inquiry panel to be set up.

Terming the ongoing probe “incomplete, biased and technically unsound”, the petitioners said it undermined India’s obligations under International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Annexe 13, which mandated an independent investigation authority.

The current five-member team is dominated by officials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), the very entities responsible for regulatory oversight, thereby violating the principle of nemo judex in causa sua (no one should be a judge in their own cause), they alleged.

The AAIB report predominantly focused on the deceased pilots, who were no longer there to defend themselves and that the report failed to examine or eliminate other more plausible technical and procedural causes of the crash, the petitioners submitted.

Accusing the authorities of selectively leaking the contents of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) to the media, they said it violated Rule 17(5) of the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017.

These leaks, they claim, fuelled a “malicious media campaign” attributing fault to the deceased pilot without corroborative evidence, amounting to state-facilitated defamation and violation of the family’s right to dignity under Article 21.

This is the second petition filed in the top court on the June 12 plane crash. The Supreme Court had on September 22 asked the Centre, the DGCA and the AAIB to respond to a PIL filed by the Safety Matters Foundation seeking an independent, fair and expeditious probe into the June 12 Air India plane crash at Ahmedabad.

Expressing concern over the selective leak of the preliminary inquiry report, which led to a media narrative blaming pilot error for the crash of the London-bound Air India Flight AI171, a Bench led by Justice Surya Kant had noted that certain aspects of the July 12 AAIB preliminary report indicating lapses on the part of the pilots were “irresponsible”.

Calling the attribution of pilot error “implausible” and “procedurally unjust,” the petitioners argue that the failure to probe design or software integration failures in Boeing’s Common Core System amounts to non-application of mind and suppression of material facts.

Sabharwal’s father said his son had an “unblemished career spanning over 30 years, with 15,638 hours of incident-free flying, including 8,596 hours on Boeing 787-8 aircraft, without a single reported lapse or incident causing fatalities or otherwise.”

The petition pointed to several technical lapses in the preliminary report.