Aug. 8 :     It took the death of one more passenger of the Alliance Air flight that crashed in Patna on July 17 to jar the government out of slumber and appoint an inquiry headed by a serving air marshal. With the death of P.M. Bopanna today at Delhi's All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, the toll in the Boeing 737-200 crash rose to 58. Bopanna, 48, had suffered 60 per cent burns and was flown to Delhi from Patna for treatment. An engineer with the National Thermal Power Corporation, a government-owned company like Alliance Air, is survived by his wife and two minor daughters. A day after the crash, civil aviation minister Sharad Yadav had announced a court of inquiry to be headed by a Patna high court judge. Government officials leading a preliminary probe into the crash immediately 'sealed' the two black boxes on the plane - a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder. But for nearly a week no requests were sent. For weeks letters kept shuttling between Delhi and Patna without any court being appointed. Apparently, the already short-staffed chief justice of Patna High Court had his own share of reservations about getting his judges embroiled in a technical probe. Ultimately, the government opted for a time-tested method - getting an air force officer to do the job. P. Rajkumar, who will head the inquiry, is a test flight expert from the defence ministry's light combat aircraft project and has earlier conducted a probe into an Indian Airlines Dornier crash at Cochin two years ago. An Air India pilot, Capt. N.S.Mehta and an assessor, S.A. Deshmukh, have been appointed to help Rajkumar. But pilots are already grumbling. 'This probe will not be a true judicial probe. It will merely be an executive probe - nothing will come of it,' said Capt. S.S Panesar, former director, flight safety, with the Indian Airlines. Courts comprising government servants are considered more susceptible to bureaucratic and political interference than judges. The Indian Commercial Pilots' Association has already expressed doubts about the fairness of any delayed probes especially 'in the light of statements by the civil aviation secretary hinting at pilot error even before any probe was launched'. Capt. Ajit Singh, president of the association said: 'This inquiry too may turn into an eyewash designed to justify earlier statements.' Contrast this with the Air France Concorde crash at Paris. The black boxes were opened almost immediately after being found in the debris. Within five days of the crash the probe details were public. 'That's what transparency is all about,' said Panesar, who has been associated as technical advisor in quite a few air crashes. Families of the passengers who died in the crash are regretting the absence of 'transparency' in the way the government is handling the probe. 'After 22 days, we don't know for whose fault our relatives died,' said Arindam Dutta, neighbour of the Dutta family which lost two of their relatives.