Air India plane crash: AAIB submits two-page probe report in Ahmedabad tragedy
Synopsis
A two-page preliminary report on the Ahmedabad plane crash has been submitted to the Ministry of Aviation. The black box was previously examined to determine the cause of the accident.
New Delhi: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has submitted a two-page preliminary report on the Ahmedabad Air India plane crash to the Ministry of Aviation and the authorities concerned. According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Crash Protection Module (CPM) from the front black box was safely retrieved, and on June 25, 2025, the memory module was successfully accessed and its data downloaded at the AAIB Lab.
Sources familiar with the process told ANI that an identical black box, referred to as a "golden chassis," was used to confirm whether data could be accurately recovered from the black boxes. One black box was recovered from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16. The investigation is being led by AAIB officials and includes technical members from the Indian Air Force, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from the United States, which is the official investigative agency of the country of the aircraft's design and manufacture.
The Director General of AAIB is heading the probe. An aviation medicine expert and an Air Traffic Control officer have also been included in the investigation team. Sources confirmed that the NTSB team is currently stationed in Delhi and working closely with Indian authorities at the AAIB Lab. Officials from Boeing and GE are also present in the national capital to assist with the technical process.
Before the crash of Air India Flight AI-171, AAIB used to send black boxes of damaged aircraft and, in some cases, even helicopters to overseas decoding centres in countries like the UK, USA, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia. Indian labs earlier lacked the equipment and dedicated facility to retrieve black box data from serious aviation accidents. That has now changed, and the AAIB Lab in Delhi is fully equipped to decode both Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR) within the country.
In earlier crashes, black box decoding was mostly done abroad. In the 1996 Charkhi Dadri crash, black boxes were decoded by IAC in Moscow and the CVR in Farnborough, UK. In the 2010 Mangalore crash, recorders were repaired and decoded by the NTSB in the US. In the 2015 Delhi crash, decoding was done at the engineering lab of Canada's Transportation Safety Board. In the 2020 Kozhikode crash, the CVR and FDR were downloaded at DGCA's flight recorder facility, but the data was processed with help from the NTSB.
Parliament Panel meets to discuss aviation safety
A meeting of Parliament's Public Accounts Committee met on Tuesday, where top officials from the Civil Aviation Ministry, including the Civil Aviation Secretary and DGCA, reportedly attended. The agenda of the meeting was believed to be the recent Air India Flight AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad, and aviation safety concerns. Issues such as passenger fees, airline charges, and tariffs were also expected to be discussed.
The bodies of all 260 victims of the Air India Flight AI-171 crash have been identified and handed over to their families, Civil Hospital Medical Superintendent Rakesh Joshi confirmed. "A total of 254 DNA matches were done, all identified and handed over. six were identified through facial recognition," he told ANI, adding that 241 were passengers and 19 were non-passengers.
(With inputs from ANI)
