The 91-year-old father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the Pilot-in-Command of the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that crashed near Ahmedabad on June 12, killing 260 people, has moved the Supreme Court seeking an independent and judicially monitored investigation into the tragedy. The petition, jointly filed by Pushkaraj Sabharwal and the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), calls for a court-monitored committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge with independent aviation and technical experts as members.
According to the petition, the current investigation conducted by the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) lacks credibility, transparency, and depth. The plea claims that the preliminary report dated June 15 is defective and overlooks critical technical and procedural factors that may have contributed to the disaster. The petitioners argue that the report “predominantly focus[es] on the deceased pilots while failing to examine or eliminate other more plausible technical and procedural causes.”
Sabharwal contends that this selective focus amounts to factual misdirection and results in an incomplete and prejudiced inquiry. He argues that blaming the pilots, who cannot defend themselves, prevents the discovery of the root cause and undermines future flight safety. The plea argues that such an investigation violates Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life, by endangering the safety of future passengers.
The petition points to several deficiencies in the ongoing probe, including the unexplained deployment of the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) before any crew input, failure to investigate electrical collapse and potential design faults, and the unexplained movement of fuel switches that reportedly flipped from “run” to “cutoff” almost simultaneously after takeoff. Comparable Boeing 787 incidents were also allegedly ignored. The plea argues that these anomalies require a deeper, independent investigation, free from institutional bias.
Sabharwal and the FIP have also urged the Supreme Court to close all previous AAIB investigations and transfer evidence to the proposed judicially supervised inquiry. They claim that officials from the AAIB wrongly implied that Captain Sabharwal cut off the fuel supply, an allegation the government denies, describing the probe as “very clean” and “very thorough.”
The petitioners insist that only a transparent, expert-led inquiry can uncover the true cause of the crash and restore trust in India’s aviation oversight system. They argue that the purpose of such an investigation is not to assign blame but to ensure accountability and prevent future tragedies.
The Supreme Court is already seized of a related petition filed by the NGO Safety Matters Foundation which questions whether the government has taken adequate measures to ensure a fair and impartial investigation. |
