‘AI 171 preliminary reports won’t…’: Ex Jet Airways CEO explains why crash reports take years

As the preliminary report on the Air India Flight AI-171 crash is submitted to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, former Jet Airways CEO Sanjiv Kapoor has urged the public to understand the role and limitations of such early-stage findings. 

“All – a reminder that the preliminary aircraft accident reports are meant to tell you what happened,” Kapoor posted on X. “The exact sequence of events, commands, indicators, positions of switches and controls, what was spoken, etc. It is not intended to tell you ‘why it happened’.”

He added, “Though sometimes the ‘why it happened’ may also be clear, in most cases that takes months or even years of additional investigation. For example, part X failed or switch was in X position is what happened. But the ‘why’ that was the case may take much longer to establish.”

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has submitted its preliminary findings on the June 2025 crash of AI-171 in Ahmedabad, which claimed more than 250 lives, ANI reported on Tuesday. The report is based on initial data extracted from the aircraft’s black boxes and early analysis by investigators.

On June 25, the memory module from the black box’s Crash Protection Module (CPM) was successfully accessed and its data downloaded at the AAIB Lab in Delhi. An identical unit, known as a “golden chassis,” was used to validate data accuracy. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered from the crash site earlier in June-one from a rooftop on June 13 and the other from debris on June 16.

This investigation marks a significant shift in India’s crash investigation capabilities. Until recently, the country lacked in-house infrastructure to fully decode black boxes from major accidents.

In earlier incidents, decoding was done in labs abroad-Moscow (1996 Charkhi Dadri crash), Farnborough (2010 Mangalore crash), and Canada (2015 Delhi crash). Even during the 2020 Kozhikode crash, the black box data was processed with help from the U.S. NTSB.

Now, the AAIB Lab in Delhi is fully equipped to handle both Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR), making India self-reliant in early-stage crash analysis.

The AI-171 investigation team includes AAIB officials, technical members from the Indian Air Force, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)-the official agency from the aircraft’s country of design.

Officials from Boeing and GE, as well as an aviation medicine expert and an Air Traffic Control officer, are also part of the core team. The NTSB team is currently stationed in Delhi and working closely with Indian authorities at the AAIB facility.

The investigation continues, with final conclusions expected only after extensive data correlation, simulations, and cross-agency analysis.