‘No dirty business’: Centre on probe into Air India crash that killed 260

According to K Rammohan Naidu Kinjarapu, minister of civil aviation, the probe into the Ahmedabad Air India jet tragedy that claimed 260 lives is not involving “no manipulation or dirty business” as of Tuesday. Concerns regarding the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau’s (AAIB) investigation into the deadly disaster in Meghaninagar, Ahmedabad, have prompted Kinjarapu to make these comments.

The 91-year-old father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, one of the two pilots of Air India Flight AI 171, who died minutes after takeoff, claimed late in September that he was visited by investigating authorities in August and that they suggested his son had cut the fuel to the plane’s engines after takeoff.

“During this interaction … they went beyond their mandate – speaking in innuendos and insinuating, on the basis of selective CVR interpretation and a so-called ‘layered voice analysis’, that my son had moved the fuel control switches from RUN to CUTOFF after take-off,” his email, dated September 17, said.

In a previous letter, he had also criticized the investigators’ “selective” dissemination of evidence, which he claimed had led to conjecture about his son’s activities, and asked the civil aviation ministry to open an extra investigation into the fatal crash.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, aviation minister Rammohan Naidu Kinjarapu said, “There is no manipulation, or there is no dirty business, happening in the investigation. It is a very clean and very thorough process that we are doing according to the rules.”

He also said that the final report will take some time, adding that the AIB is doing a “very transparent and independent study on the final report”. “We do not want to pressure them into coming up with some hasty report. So they are going to take the necessary time for it,” Kinjarapu told reporters.

Shortly after taking off, the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner headed for Gatwick, which was based at Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, collided with a Meghaninagar medical college building.

The disaster claimed the lives of 241 of the 242 people on board and 19 more who were on the ground when it happened, for a total of 260 fatalities.