Ahmedabad Air India plane crash: Ahead of one-year anniversary, probe report may be ‘inconclusive’

While Union Minister for Civil Aviation Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu recently said the AAIB was in “the final stages of the probe”, officials privy to the investigation said that its report will be subject to a “consensus discussion” with the Indian body’s US counterpart, NTSB or National Transport Safety Board. The plane that crashed was a Dreamliner, made by the US plane manufacturer Boeing.

Sources said the AAIB probe could provide a definitive account of the systems failure on the flight causing the RAT to deploy within seconds of take-off, having undertaken a “thorough analysis” of a “specific” fault that appears to have originated in the aircraft’s electrical system and caused a cascading disruption of power distribution and cockpit systems.

Apart from “potential technical failures”, the AAIB also probed “pilot actions”, sources said, adding that so far ‘incriminating circumstantial evidence’ linking either pilot to the crash has been elusive. While Captain Sumeet Sabharwal was the pilot, Clive Kunder was the co-pilot, with Kunder giving the mayday call, an officer said.

An officer, privy to the investigation, said: “From the beginning, the probe has focused on understanding the cause of the aircraft going straight into emergency backup mode, triggering the command for RAT deployment, as soon as it lifted off… The investigation has correlated the EAFR (Enhanced Aircraft Flight Recorder) findings with the statement of the sole survivor as well as the communication between the cockpit and the Air Traffic Control Tower at Ahmedabad Airport.”

The AAIB’s preliminary report, released on July 12, 2025, said the RAT had deployed “during the initial climb”, and began supplying hydraulic power roughly eight seconds after take-off. In a modern aircraft, RAT deployment typically indicates a severe loss of electrical or hydraulic power, the official said, adding: “The probe has also delved into the possibility of manual RAT deployment. But the findings indicate that the deployment was an automatic system response. Once the trigger for deployment is made, the RAT physically deploys within a second, which is why it was deployed immediately after lift off.”

The official added that the probe also looked at how the aircraft had lost thrust and begun to descend immediately after reaching the maximum speed of 180 knots – even descending “below its Vr and V2 speeds of 155 kt and 162 kt respectively… even before it had crossed the periphery of the airport”. Vr is the airspeed at which a pilot initiates rotation, or pulls back on controls to lift the nose of an aircraft and start the climb; while V2 is the target safety speed for the initial climb, to ensure aircraft control and climb performance even if an engine fails.

The officer said: “It coincides with the message relayed to the ATC by the pilots that they were losing thrust… The pilot did not make any mention of an untoward or unexpected human action having led to the catastrophe…”