The Air India 171 crash investigation board’s selective release of cockpit voice recorder data has prompted some pilots to question its transparency, while others have accused it of hinting at "pilot guilt" without providing evidence.
The pilots, including flight instructors and an aviation safety consultant, have said the decision by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) to release only 28 words of summarised dialogue — not the actual transcript — undermines public trust in a high-stakes investigation.
The AAIB’s preliminary report, released on Saturday, said the fuel supply to both engines was cut off — one second apart — just after takeoff. Both switches were subsequently moved back from cut-off to run position. Engine 1 began recovering but Engine 2 struggled — and the aircraft was too low to recover.
"In the cockpit voice recording, 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 AAIB said in its report, selectively summarising cockpit dialogue without revealing who said what.
Pilots have asserted that crash investigators would have access to the full cockpit voice recording, capturing every word exchanged during the aircraft’s brief journey — from its movement on the tarmac to the crash — and be able to identify which pilot said what.
"Holding back the full transcript from the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) gives the impression of a childish cover-up — it is as if they want to hide something," said Captain Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation safety consultant in Chennai who has been an instructor pilot for Boeing 737s.
The cockpit voice recorder captures audio from both pilots and other cockpit sounds on separate channels.
"The investigators would know exactly which pilot said what — but the lines in the AAIB report appear to have been written to give the impression that the investigators don’t know," Ranganathan told The Telegraph.
"For a genuinely transparent investigation, they could have released the full transcript. What, if anything, was said by either pilot after that brief exchange would be critical to this investigation."
The flight data recorder shows that the aircraft crashed within 32 seconds of takeoff and, pilots say, transcribing the words exchanged in the cockpit would take less than an hour.
The Airlines Pilots Association, India, which represents nearly 1,000 pilots, said it had asked the AAIB to allow its members to observe the investigation but received no response.
Experts from the US Federal Aviation Authority, the National Transportation Safety Board, Boeing, and the aircraft’s jet engine manufacturer, General Electric, participated in the investigation. A team from the United Kingdom’s AAIB too visited Ahmedabad.
“The (AAIB) report is pushing us in the direction of the pilots, but it’s not giving us the data to support a conclusion as to who was responsible… if they were responsible for switching the fuel switches off,” said Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of airlineratings.com, an aviation news website.
Thomas and other aviation experts said US and UK investigators would have examined the aircraft and engines for any flaws, given their global implications.
Wreckage of Air India's Boeing 787-8 aircraft, which was operating flight AI 171 from Ahmedabad to London, placed under tight security, seen a month after the tragedy, in Ahmedabad, Saturday, July 12, 2025. PTI
The AAIB report said that at this stage of the investigation, there were no recommended actions for B787-8 operators or the engine manufacturer.
“British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are major operators of the 787,” Thomas told NDTV.
“So, if there was any possibility it was a 787 issue, then we would have had an airworthiness directive out very, very quickly…. Every day, there are 2,000 flights involving 787s… so from the 787 perspective and General Electric perspective, I don’t think there’s any questions to answer.”
Some aviation experts have described the sequence of events in the cockpit as beyond comprehension.
“There is no procedure anywhere in the history of aviation where immediately after you rotate (take off), you grab both fuel switches and place them to cut-off,” said Steve Scheibner in a fresh post on Saturday on his YouTube channel, Captain Steeeve.
A query sent by this newspaper to the civil aviation ministry on Sunday evening, seeking its perspective on the concerns expressed by pilots about the need for more transparency in the AAIB report, has not brought a reply.
The minister of state for civil aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, had told reporters on Saturday that the AAIB report reflected only preliminary findings and “until the final report comes out, we should not draw any conclusions”.