How India’s air accident watchdog is failing its biggest test yet

On June 20, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson addressed a mourning workforce with a sombre internal note. His words urged calm, restraint, and faith in the investigative process.“It is vital that the facts — whatever they may be — are known so that we and the industry at large can learn from them,” Wilson wrote. “The final report can take many months, though the AAIB [Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau] may choose to issue interim updates or reports. If there is any discovery during the investigation that suggests airlines or suppliers need to change something urgently, we have confidence that such information would be shared quickly.”But nearly two weeks on, the AAIB has remained quiet — no preliminary findings, no interim reports. In this silence, theories and speculation grow, and growing fear takes hold.“They seem to be at a standstill,” said AK Chopra, former joint director general of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and a veteran investigator who oversaw more than 50 air crash inquiries until his retirement in 2010. “There is no one there (at the AAIB) to navigate a crash of this magnitude — and they don’t appear to be taking help from the DGCA.”Chopra said that by this stage, basic protocols should already have been completed.“There should have been a Court of Inquiry. A full wreckage chart should have been made. The debris on site should have been photographed, mapped and catalogued. Simulator tests should have been initiated to evaluate mechanical theories, including the reasons for landing gear being deployed and thereby eliminating various possibilities one by one,” he said.However, there is no official word on any of the formalities that should have been done by now. Instead, there are reports — with visual evidence — that even as the wreckage of the plane was being transported from the crash site, it got stuck in a tree in Ahmedabad, making experts like Chopra question why it was being taken unsupervised.Calls, messages and emails sent to AAIB director Yugandhar Singh went unanswered. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/-nh6P9ficNk?si=faT5v3gW5YstWPUdTurf wars, delays and gaps in protocolThe AAIB was set up following the 2010 Air India Express crash in Mangalore to replace the DGCA as India’s primary civil aviation crash investigation body. But this transition has long been marred by overlapping mandates and friction between the two agencies which may be slowing the progress in the current investigation, believe experts.Take fuel testing — one of the priorities in any crash, more specifically in this case, when both engines appeared to have lost total power within a minute into flight. The aircraft in question was fuelled by Adani Airports’ bowser as well as the tank. As a standard procedure, the bowser and fuel tank were supposed to be sealed immediately after the crash, and samples were to be sent to multiple independent laboratories for testing.But in this case, the AAIB believed that fuel sealing was the DGCA’s responsibility, according to a person aware of the subject who did not wish to be identified. As a result, the fuel was sent to only IndianOil instead of multiple agencies, which has slowed down the process, thereby compromising the standard protocol.The Adani bowser and tanker too is sealed, creating challenges for the operator to fuel flights.In response to an emailed questionnaire, an Adani Airports’ spokesperson said they were cooperating with the agencies.Then, there is the black box — the most critical piece of evidence in aviation accidents. Its recovery, transport and analysis are tightly regulated under global ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) standards. In this case, this official said, even this process has faced unexplained delays. A case study in contrast: Kozhikode 2020The contrast with India’s handling of the 2020 Air India Express crash in Kozhikode, where the runway is on a mountain top surrounded by gorges. Investigators recovered the black box within five hours, despite heavy rain and difficult terrain.The then civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri made the disclosure the next day.The AAIB’s then director general Aurobindo Handa and his team brought the black box to the DGCA’s lab in New Delhi. However, the DGCA official responsible hesitated to open the device, fearing that any mishandling would be blamed on him. The matter then escalated up to the then civil aviation secretary, Pradeep Singh Kharola, who then involved the ministry of external affairs. A decision was made to send the black box to the US, to Honeywell’s certified lab — as the other approved facility in Singapore said it needed more time.There were even more challenges ahead. Transporting the black box was itself a complex diplomatic and logistical operation. It turned out that the devices cannot be X-rayed due to magnetic tapes, and must be carried onboard, not in cargo. Multiple officials, including Customs and Intelligence Bureau personnel, were then involved in the mission and travelled with the investigations team. Once in the US, the black box was opened and decoded in front of Indian officials, with the entire process video-recorded. All ICAO regulations were followed. It was then brought back and analysed.“Nearly 80-90% of the investigation is complete once the black box is read,” said a senior official familiar with that case. “We pin-pointed the exact moment of touchdown at 4,583 metres from the threshold. That clarified it was pilot error (who landed way deep into the hilltop runway).”This swift access to critical data allowed for a preliminary report within days, helping the public and the industry understand what had happened while final report and recommendations followed many months later. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/9KZb2-GH4z8?si=-cpZB00QE0gkM5ogTelemetry, tail integrity and the RAT mysteryIn the case of AI 171, external observers are puzzled by a range of technical questions — some of which might already have been answered had the black box been decoded. An international aviation executive with knowledge of the crash said one video evidence and conversations with many executives in the know indicate that the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployed during take-off.RAT deployment is fail-safe that activates only during catastrophic loss of both hydraulic and electrical power but the speed at which it occurred here is raising eyebrows.“RAT deployment usually takes a little time,” the executive said. “But here, it happened in seconds. So, did the aircraft lose thrust during the take-off roll — but then how did it rotate? That’s a mystery.”He also pointed to images showing the 787’s fuselage embedded in a building — but with the tail section relatively intact.“That suggests the black box should have been salvageable locally also — unless it got crushed later. Yet no image or update on its status has been released, unlike in earlier cases,” the executive added.The 787 is equipped with two digital flight data recorders (DFDRs) — typically located in separate locations, one in the forward section and one in the tail, as per Boeing’s safety design.Civil Aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said on June 24 that talks of sending the black box abroad are, “all speculation. The black box is very much in India and it is currently being investigated by the AAIB”.“The longer it takes to retrieve and decode these, the higher the risk of damage or data loss,” the senior official added. “Importantly, the black box would have told us if there’s a systemic fault in the Dreamliner and a fleet-wide corrective action is needed — urgently.”A second senior official familiar with the investigation noted that two things have changed in this crash than the past two crashes.One, it does not appear easy to blame the pilot in this case because all power seems to have been lost.Two, there are much bigger names, including GE’s engines, involved besides Air India, which is no longer a government airline. It is now operated by the Tatas and the airport it operates from belongs to another big group like the Adanis.“There are too many things and high stakes involved, maybe that is slowing down the process,” he said. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/aVonhZenoAE?si=equP1d1bS0D5OmMCCorporate silence and a troubled regulatorOne additional way to get some sense of the reason for this crash is the two manufacturers themselves — both Boeing and GE, which respectively make the 787’s airframe and engines, do receive live telemetry (recording and transmitting the readings of an instrument) from aircraft in flight. This is often used when disputes over performance like fuel consumption arise, the international executive quoted earlier confirmed. But this telemetry is limited — typically capturing a fraction of the 400+ parameters logged by the black box.It also remains unclear whether such telemetry is recorded and archived consistently for all flights, or only for select monitored cases.Both Boeing and GE declined to respond to comments for the story.Boeing has now seen multiple accidents in the last 10 years — two involving the 737 MAX, and now the 787. The company has also been under US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-imposed production caps following multiple whistleblower complaints about rushed and sub-standard assembly including the 787s. Airline officials say privately that they are now worried if any findings from this crash could further slow down their delivery schedules, which were only now beginning to stabilise.AAIB’s record under scrutinyThe AAIB’s handling of this case has renewed scrutiny of its capacity and competence as well.The parliamentary standing committee on transport, tourism and culture, in its report tabled in the Rajya Sabha this year, has already pointed out poor budgetary allocations to India’s key aviation safety and oversight agencies including just ₹30 crore to the DGCA and ₹20 crore to the AAIB in what is the world’s third-largest aviation market with 1,700 planes on order.Former DGCA crash investigator Chopra said the bureau needs structural reform once the current probe is complete.The track record of the quality of its investigations and its recommendations don’t inspire much confidence in its ability to come up with anything substantial in improving the safety of air travel, he said.“After the 2011 Tawang crash involving a Pawan Hans Mi-17, they actually recommended that pilots should jump out with parachutes if hydraulic systems fail,” Chopra recalled. “That’s absurd. Mi-17s are often used for VIP transport — how is that even feasible with passengers sitting behind? A trained investigator would not make such a recommendation.”Failures and disasters when they strike cause immense loss, but they also become stepping stones for improvement. This tragedy can be one such to make air travel safer.But first, the black box needs to be unboxed urgently.