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Friday marks one year since a deadly Air India Boeing crash, which killed 260 people in a densely populated suburb of the city of Ahmedabad in India’s western state of Gujarat.
Families of those killed gathered at the site on Friday to mark the anniversary of the disaster, but they are still waiting for answers about what caused the plane to come down shortly after takeoff from the nearby airport.
Indian authorities are expected to issue an interim report in the coming days, another source of frustration for the victims’ relatives, who had been hoping for a definitive finding and a final disclosure. Media reports, citing unnamed sources, suggest that Indian investigators will delay issuing a final report into the crash, citing the need to complete an analysis of the plane’s engines.
Under international aviation rules, a final report is due “if possible” within a year of an accident. If an investigation goes on for longer, an interim statement should be issued on each anniversary.
What happened to the Air India plane?
Flight AI171, an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane which had taken off only moments before, en route to London Gatwick, crashed into a medical college hostel in the residential area of Meghani Nagar, close to the international airport on the edge of India’s western city of Ahmedabad.
According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, the plane’s final signal was received seconds after takeoff at 1:38pm local time (08:08 GMT). It had reached an altitude of 625 feet (190 metres) before crashing back to the ground outside the airport.
The plane had issued a mayday alert to air traffic control just before all communications from the aircraft ceased.
How many people died in the crash?
Of the 242 people on board, all except one passenger were killed. These included 169 Indian nationals and 52 British nationals. A total of 260 people died, as 19 people on the ground close to the crash site were also killed. Another 67 people near the site were injured.
The sole survivor on board the plane, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, is a British national whose brother was killed in the crash.
On Thursday, Ramesh’s representative, Sanjiv Patel, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that Air India had paid £21,500 ($28,800) in compensation to Ramesh to help support his wife and their five-year-old son. It is not clear whether similar payments have been made to other families.
Relatives of the victims are meeting on Friday at a conference organised by lawyers, along with aviation and air safety experts, in Ahmedabad. They are due to hold a candlelight vigil after sunset.
What have preliminary reports shown?
This was the world’s first airliner crash involving a 787 Dreamliner, a Boeing model that has been in service since 2011.
In accordance with international aviation law, India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) published a preliminary report one month after the disaster.
That 15-page document said the fuel supply to the jet’s engines had been cut off moments before the crash, raising questions about possible pilot error.
It also published a conversation between the captain and his copilot about the fuel supply being cut off – two brief sentences that prompted theories of pilot suicide.
The report was met with strong criticism.
It did not state why the fuel switches were turned off – whether it was the fault of a pilot, or a result of a malfunction.
The preliminary report did not make any safety recommendations to Boeing or engine maker GE Aerospace, suggesting no technical issues had been discovered.
The crash also hit Air India at a sensitive stage of its post-privatisation turnaround, which has been slowed by supply-chain snags, an airspace ban imposed by Pakistan on Indian carriers and, more recently, the US-Israeli war on Iran.
What’s the latest on the investigation?
Under international rules, a final report is due “if possible” within a year of an accident, but sometimes investigations take longer. If it cannot be completed, therefore, an interim statement should be issued on each anniversary. With investigations continuing, the AAIB is expected to issue only an interim report at this stage.
The Federation of Indian Pilots union has been pushing for investigators to seek more technical data about the plane from Boeing and Air India to allow for a “rebuttal of the pilot suicide theory being explored by the AAIB”.
“It [an interim report only] will cause more speculation and more misunderstanding,” Charanvir Randhawa, the union’s president, told reporters at a packed news conference in Ahmedabad ahead of the anniversary of the crash.
“We have requested the Indian government and India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) not to come out with any interim report.”
A cockpit recording of dialogue between the two pilots of the Air India 787 before it crashed supported the view that the captain cut the flow of fuel to its engines, according to US officials’ early assessment reported by Reuters last year.
But the AAIB said at the time it was “too early to reach any definite conclusions”.
Investigators conducted engine testing in April and visited France last month as part of their analysis of the engine management unit, a source told Reuters on the condition of anonymity, as the information is not public.
On Thursday, Bloomberg also reported that the final report into the crash can be expected within three months, once studies of the engines, which had been sent to the US for examination, are concluded.
The captain’s father has asked India’s top court to order an independent investigation that examines possible causes other than deliberate pilot action – a cause that has been suspected in some other fatal crashes and was confirmed in the case of Germanwings Flight 9525, which crashed into the French Alps in 2015, killing all 150 people on board.
