The ministry of civil aviation on Thursday told the Supreme Court that “no blame is attributed to anyone” for the Air India plane crash on July 12 that killed 260 people, dispelling media reports that had sought to blame the pilot who died in the mishap.
“I understand the feelings of the father (of pilot Sumeet Sabharwal). There has been no blame attributed to anyone. In fact, as a matter of fact, the ministry of civil aviation had earlier, after the accident, issued a press note that there is no blame attributed to anybody,” solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, representing the ministry, told a bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.
Seeking to dispel international media reports attributing the crash to the pilot, Mehta told the bench that the inquiry conducted into the mishap was in accordance with international civil aviation crash probe rules formulated by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the NGO Safety Matters Foundation, said that according to government rules, such serious accidents require a court of inquiry, not just an AAIB (Aviation Accidents Investigation Bureau) probe.
“There is an international convention. There is an ICAO. There is a regime in place. Suppose some foreigners are victims, those countries also send their representatives
for investigation,” Mehta told the bench.
Justice Bagchi pointed out that the AAIB inquiry was not to apportion blame. “It is to clarify the cause of the accident so that the same does not happen again,” he said.
The court was dealing with a petition filed by the father of the pilot, Pushkaraj Sabharwal, seeking a Supreme Court-monitored probe by a retired judge of the apex court. According to him, the AAIB had given a wrong report attributing the crash to his son. Besides the aggrieved father, the Federation of Indian Pilots and the NGO Safety Matters Foundation had also sought a court-monitored probe into the crash.
In all, 260 people were killed in the crash immediately after takeoff from Ahmedabad airport, including 240 on board and 20 others on the ground. Only one passenger, Viswash Kumar Ramesh, survived.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan said the investigation should also go into the causes of the crash so that corrective measures can be taken.
“Let’s not pre-judge anything. It should not look like a fight between airlines,” Justice Kant observed when Bhushan argued that all Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets should be grounded in view of apprehensions raised by pilots about their safety and the risk to passengers.
Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for the deceased pilot’s father, said that though there was a statutory regime in place for dealing with such air mishaps, it was not being followed by the authorities.