Sumeet Sabharwal told his father he was planning to resign three days before he was killed in the crash in June. Photo / Enterprise News
The pilot in the Air India plane crash was not to blame for the disaster, India’s top court has said.
All but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner were killed when the aircraft plunged into a medical students’ hostel in a suburb of Ahmedabad in June, less than a minute after taking off.
A preliminary report by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) found switches controlling fuel flow to the jet’s two engines were turned off, leading to a loss of thrust at take-off.
US officials believe Sumeet Sabharwal, the captain, probably cut them off.
However, a judge in India’s Supreme Court told a court hearing on Friday that “nobody” could blame Sabharwal for the crash.
Pushkaraj Sabharwal, the pilot’s 91-year-old father, had called for an “independent” investigation that would consider causes other than the pilot’s actions.
“It’s extremely unfortunate, this crash, but you should not carry this burden that your son is being blamed. Nobody can blame him for anything,” Justice Surya Kant told him.
Addressing the AAIB’s preliminary report, he said: “One pilot asked whether the fuel was cut off by the other; the other said no. There’s no suggestion of fault in that report.”
Another judge suggested there were safety concerns about Boeing planes across the world and the crash should be understood within this context.
Air India said it found no fault with the fuel switches on its Boeing aircraft.
Justice Kant went on to dismiss reports of the pilot being to blame as “nasty”.
Pushkaraj Sabharwal had drawn attention to a Wall Street Journal story that pointed towards pilot error as the crash’s cause and cited an Indian Government source.
“We are not bothered by foreign reports,” Justice Kant told him. “That is nasty reporting. No one in India believes it was the pilot’s fault.”
Pushkaraj Sabharwal requested a fresh investigation into the crash after arguing the ongoing process was “non-independent”.
He said two officials from the AAIB had implied his son was the one to cut the fuel, despite the Government denying this allegation and insisting their investigation was “very clean” and “very thorough”.
“They asserted that the [cockpit voice recorder] analysis implicated Captain Sumeet Sabharwal in the accident and inquired about the reasons for the alleged actions,” he said.
Sabharwal told the investigation his son was a highly qualified and trained pilot, who “regularly passed all [Directorate General of Civil Aviation]-mandated medical examinations”.
Sumeet Sabharwal joined Air India in 1994 and logged 15,638 hours of flying time, having recorded 8596 of those on the 787 aircraft. He flew a Boeing 777 before training to fly the newer Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in 2014.
After the crash, the Telegraph reported that the pilot’s mental health was being examined by investigators after the death of his mother and separation from his wife.
But his father told the investigation team his son was “not under any emotional distress”.
He has accused the investigation officials of being “biased” and causing unsubstantiated blame to the pilot, who cannot defend himself.
His father has also raised questions about the “unexplained ram air turbine (Rat) deployment prior to crew inputs”.
The Rat is an emergency generator that automatically deploys when both primary and back-up electrical or hydraulic systems fail.
As per the preliminary report, the “Rat deployed at take-off, before the pilots could have made any control inputs or touched the fuel switches”, he said.
“This premature activation is a direct indicator of an electrical or digital malfunction, contradicting the preliminary report’s inference that pilot actions initiated power loss.”
Sabharwal had never been involved in any major incident in his career until the disaster on June 12.
Neil Pais, 61, one of Sabharwal’s former colleagues, previously told the Telegraph: “He was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to fly with.”
Three days before his death, Sabharwal told his father that he was planning to resign from Air India to take care of him.
According to an early US assessment of the plane’s black box data, Sabharwal probably moved the fuel switches and cut off the supply.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 39-year-old businessman who lives in Leicester, was the only person to survive the crash.
Speaking publicly for the first time this week, Ramesh said he struggled to leave his bedroom because of constant flashbacks that have left him mentally “broken”.
Fifty-three Britons were among the 241 passengers on board flight AI171 who died when the aircraft crashed 11 seconds after taking off, killing 19 more on the ground.
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