Air India crash report: Investigators to miss one year deadline; here’s what’s happening

Air India crash probe: Investigators will miss the one-year deadline on Friday to explain why the Air India jet crashed. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is likely to issue a status report this week explaining the delay.

According to a report in Bloomberg, the delay is because an examination of the Boeing 787’s engines in the United States is still incomplete. It said that a final report is expected within three months, by when studies of the GE Aerospace engines should be completed. The examination is taking place in the United States because only a few facilities globally have the tools needed to dismantle the engines properly.

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Air India 787, which was headed to London, crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025, killing 260 people in the world’s deadliest air disaster in a decade. A preliminary report released last year said the aircraft’s engine fuel control switches moved almost simultaneously from “RUN” to “CUTOFF”, starving both engines of fuel soon after the flight took off.

It was earlier reported that the Indian officials investigating the crash were preparing an interim report rather than a final one before the first anniversary because the investigation was considered complex and time-consuming. Under international rules, a final report is due within a year of an accident, but if that is not completed, an interim statement should be issued on each anniversary. 

The crash came at a sensitive stage for Air India’s post-privatisation turnaround, which has been slowed by supply-chain snags, the Iran war and an airspace ban imposed by Pakistan on Indian carriers.

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Pilot actions are also being examined. According to Reuters, as per the US officials’ early assessment, a cockpit recording of the dialogue between the two pilots before the crash supported the view that the captain cut the flow of fuel to the engines. The AAIB said at the time that it was “too early to reach any definite conclusions”.

The captain’s father later asked India’s top court to order an independent investigation that considered causes other than deliberate pilot action, which has been suspected in some other fatal crashes and was confirmed in the case of Germanwings in 2015.