Ahmedabad Air India crash: Why pilot grouping objected to probe agency summoning captain’s nephew

FIP’s challenge to recent summons

The FIP has said that Sumeet Sabharwal’s nephew Varun Anand, who is also a pilot with Air India, is neither a factual, technical, or expert witness. It argued that calling him for the investigation further raised the apprehension that the investigation is “proceeding on a preconceived narrative” of blaming Sabharwal for the fatal crash.

The AAIB is the government agency under India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) that is responsible for investigating civil aviation accidents and serious incidents. It has argued that the Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules 2025 empower the investigators “to call and examine any witness relevant to the investigation”.

After Anand was summoned, the law firm APJ-SLG Law Offices sent a legal notice to the AAIB on the FIP’s behalf. It stated that Anand does not operate the Boeing 787 — the aircraft type that crashed in Ahmedabad — and had no association with the ill-fated flight’s “planning, dispatch, operation, maintenance, certification, airworthiness clearance or crew composition”.

‘Summons unwarranted’

While the legal notice called the summoning “wholly unwarranted” and amounting to “harassment and distress”, it said that Anand will appear before the investigators via video conference to answer their queries.

“He (Anand) was not present at the site of the accident… the summoning of the nephew of the deceased pilot and his relatives, irrespective of their lack of nexus with the incident, reinforces the apprehension that such actions are not rooted in any lawful investigative necessity,” the notice said.

The tail end of the AI 171 stuck on top of the hostel building of the BJMC in Ahmedabad. (Express Photo by Bhupendra Rana | June 13, 2025)

It added that asking Anand to appear was contrary to aircraft accident investigation rules, “which strictly confine accident investigations to technical, safety-oriented fact-finding and expressly prohibit attribution of blame or liability”.

“The sole basis for calling Capt. Varun Anand appears to be his familial relationship with the deceased Pilot-in-Command, which is impermissible in law and renders the summoning arbitrary and unsustainable,” the notice said. It referenced the SC petition, calling the issues concerning the “manner and integrity of the investigation” as “sub judice”.

FIP’s prior allegations against AAIB probe

The legal notice alleged that the AAIB’s summoning of Anand raises a serious apprehension that the investigators are working with a preconceived notion and are looking to blame the pilots rather than “objectively examining systemic, mechanical or operational causes”. This allegation is not new, and both the FIP and Pushkar Raj Sabharwal have been questioning the investigation.

The AAIB’s preliminary investigation report, released a month after the accident, said that the Air India Boeing 787-8 aircraft crashed after both its engines were starved of fuel as the two fuel control switches transitioned from ‘RUN’ to ‘CUTOFF’ position within a second of each other moments after lift-off. From the cockpit voice recorder data, the preliminary probe report notes that one of the pilots asked the other why he cut off the fuel, to which the other pilot responded, saying he did not.

To be sure, the report didn’t mention that fuel control switches — which allow and cut fuel flow to the plane’s engines — moved physically, and used the term “transitioned” to describe the change of mode from RUN to CUTOFF. It also didn’t state that either of the pilots moved them.

However, the selective information presented in the report had many believing that it implicitly pointed a finger at the flight crew — particularly Sabharwal, a highly experienced pilot. Pilot suicide theories also started doing the rounds, even as the probe is still underway and the government has assured that all aspects and possible causes will be thoroughly examined. Pilot bodies, including the FIP, had earlier raised strong objections to the preliminary report.

Then, in September 2025, the FIP had alleged that a delegation of AAIB officials made an unsolicited visit to Pushkar Raj Sabharwal’s house late August under the pretext of offering condolences. They allegedly made damaging “insinuations” based on a “selective CVR (cockpit voice recorder) interpretation and a “layered voice analysis”, suggesting that Sumeet Sabharwal had deliberately moved the engine fuel control switches. The pilot grouping had termed this visit and the interaction as a “gross and calculated overreach of the AAIB’s mandate”.

‘Strategic manoeuvre to establish pilot error’

“It represents a deliberate strategic manoeuvre designed to pre-emptively establish a ‘pilot error’ narrative. By confronting a grieving, vulnerable family member with speculative and uncorroborated claims outside of any formal investigative report, the officials were attempting to control the public and official discourse before a comprehensive analysis of all factors was complete,” the FIP wrote in a letter to the MoCA, demanding that the Central government initiate a judicial probe into the crash.

“The actions undertaken by the AAIB in the intervening period have not only violated stmilies and the aviation fraternity in the current investigative process. Therefore, it is a formal demand, grounded in law and precedent, for the immediate invocation of a judicial probe. We assert that this is the only remaining path to salvage the credibility of the accident investigation process in India, deliver justice to all the souls lost, and uphold public faith in our nation’s commitment to aviation safety,” the pilot association had said then.