Mayday…Mayday…Mayday…No Power…No Thrust…Going Down ~ Final words of Captain on AI Flight 171
Introduction
The Preliminary Report on the accident of Air India Flight 171 was released on Friday, 11 July 2025.
From both an epistemic and teleological perspective, the obligation to issue a preliminary report following an aircraft accident finds its legal foundation in Annex 13 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation—the Chicago Convention of 1944. Annex 13, which governs aircraft accident and incident investigation, embodies the collective will of States to learn from aviation tragedies with a view not to attribute blame, but to prevent recurrence. Paragraph 7.4 of the Annex mandates that the State conducting the investigation—typically the State of Occurrence—shall release a preliminary report within 30 days of the date of the accident, if the investigation is not completed within that time. The epistemic imperative behind this provision is clear: that knowledge, even in its early form, must not be hoarded but shared promptly to inform, alert, and galvanize risk mitigation measures among States, operators, and manufacturers. It is an embodiment of the maxim that ignorance breeds vulnerability, and timely awareness preserves life.
Teleologically, this requirement serves a higher normative function—one that transcends legal formality and touches upon the moral architecture of international civil aviation. The preliminary report is not merely a document; it is a gesture of international accountability, a first step in the choreography of truth-seeking that aims to restore public trust, reaffirm regulatory integrity, and illuminate operational blind spots. The State of Occurrence assumes not just a procedural obligation, but a fiduciary responsibility to the global aviation community, standing as both witness and custodian of the first threads of causality. In doing so, it must balance the urgency of disclosure with the discipline of accuracy, knowing that the content and timeliness of this report may inform fleet-grounding decisions, provoke technical reviews, and, most importantly, serve as the first whisper of justice for those who can no longer speak.
The Enigma of Air India Flight 171
The preliminary findings released by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) on the catastrophic crash of Air India Flight 171 offer a sobering insight into one of the most confounding aviation disasters in recent memory. On the morning of 12 June, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operated by Air India and bound for London Gatwick from Ahmedabad, plunged into a densely populated district mere seconds after takeoff. Of the 242 persons on board, 260 lives were lost—among them the crew and nearly all passengers. One solitary survivor, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, emerged from the wreckage through a breach in the fuselage.
This was the first known crash of a Boeing 787 aircraft—a fleet held in high repute for its technological sophistication and operational integrity. The aircraft in question, 11 years into service, had performed over 700 flights in the preceding year, placing it well within the parameters of standard operational life cycles, particularly when compared with the global average aircraft age of 14.8 years.
The preliminary report (with emphasis that it is ONLY a preliminary report subject to further detailed investigation) does not attribute the accident to any mechanical or systemic failure. Rather, it draws attention to a profoundly troubling sequence of human actions—actions that remain incomprehensible to seasoned aviators. Shortly after takeoff, both fuel control switches were turned to the ‘off’ position, an action that instantly terminated engine thrust. The cockpit voice recorder captures a moment of confusion and alarm: one pilot is heard asking the other, “Why did you do the cutoff?” to which the other replies, “I didn’t.” Though the switches were quickly reset and one engine began to restart, the other failed to arrest core speed deceleration, rendering the aircraft incapable of maintaining altitude.
At the time, First Officer Clive Kunder, 32, was piloting the aircraft under the monitoring supervision of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, 56. Within moments, as the aircraft reached 400 feet above ground, Captain Sabharwal issued a frantic Mayday call. The aircraft managed a peak altitude of merely 625 feet before succumbing to its loss of thrust and crashing.
The investigative team, constituted on 13 June, reflects a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach, comprising an aviation medicine expert, an air traffic control officer, and representatives of the United States National Transportation Safety Board. Their mandate extends beyond technical reconstruction—it is also to ensure procedural integrity and transparency, which have already come under scrutiny.
Experts consulted by the BBC were unanimous in their concern: fuel cutoff switches are not easily manipulated and are shielded against accidental activation. Professor Graham Braithwaite noted that they are “protected against somebody just brushing against it,” underscoring the gravity of what transpired in that cockpit. Such an act, whether inadvertent or otherwise, challenges fundamental assumptions about cockpit discipline, crew resource management, and design safeguards.
Air India, in its official communication, has expressed solidarity with the victims’ families and affirmed its willingness to cooperate fully with investigators. However, this gesture, though necessary, has done little to pacify the anguish of the bereaved. Dr. Mario Donadi, a colleague of the late Dr. Prateek Joshi, a victim of the tragedy, described the report as “a huge slap in the face,” capturing the sense of injustice and opacity perceived by those left behind.
The Airline Pilots’ Association of India has called for enhanced transparency and a more granular exposition of the events. Their appeal echoes a wider call within the aviation community for a thorough and unambiguous accounting of what led to the disabling of both engines at such a critical phase of flight.
Investigative steps still pending include detailed fuel sample testing, analysis of the aircraft’s two flight data and voice recorders, and examination of post-mortem reports of passengers and crew. These inquiries are expected to culminate in a final report within a year—a report that must serve not merely as an epitaph to those who perished, but as a catalyst for meaningful reform in air safety oversight.
The Juridical Burden of Aircraft Safety in the Wake of Air India Flight 171
In the unrelenting quest for safety in civil aviation, duty is indivisible, and silence is seldom innocent. The crash of Air India Flight 171—an event that extinguished 260 lives—has brought to the fore, once again, the question of what constitutes responsible action in the complex interplay between design, certification, and operational diligence. A striking revelation that has since emerged is that the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in 2018, had issued a cautionary directive concerning fuel control switches in Boeing 737 aircraft. Although Flight 171 operated a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the suggestion that similar fuel switch configurations were in use—and that Air India had failed to test for this vulnerability—invites sobering reflections on the scope and discharge of responsibility by both manufacturer and operator.
To dissect this matter within a legal-teleological framework, one must begin with the principle of constructive knowledge. In international aviation law and state practice, a manufacturer such as Boeing is presumed to possess not only knowledge of the physical structure of its aircraft but also the potential behavioral characteristics of its systems under foreseeable conditions. A warning from the FAA, even if directed at the 737 family, should have served as a trigger for a wider audit of systemic vulnerabilities across its fleet, especially where the design logic is shared or mirrored.
The jurisprudence on latent defects, particularly in transnational aviation law, holds that a manufacturer cannot isolate accountability to one aircraft model where the mechanical or ergonomic features exist across multiple types. Ergo, the burden of reasonableness would require Boeing to examine, or at the very least, advise its client airlines of the need to examine, the integrity of such critical systems in related aircraft families, including the Dreamliner.
Conversely, the airline operator—Air India, in this instance, carries the legal burden of operational vigilance. ICAO’s Annex 6, Part I, to the Chicago Convention lays down the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) for aircraft operations, which mandate that the operator maintain the continued airworthiness of aircraft through a structured safety management system (SMS). It is also incumbent on operators to heed and act upon airworthiness directives, safety recommendations, and technical alerts—whether issued by the manufacturer, aviation authorities, or the broader aviation community.
Air India’s reported failure to test the aircraft for the switch-related risk, particularly in light of FAA’s earlier concern, suggests a breach of this operational duty. The doctrine of culpa in vigilando—fault in failing to supervise or monitor—resonates here. An operator, while not expected to redesign aircraft, is certainly expected to monitor emerging safety advisories and to test its fleet where such advisories may be relevant.
At the heart of the tragedy lies the cockpit voice recording capturing a bewildering exchange between pilots, one asking the other, “Why did you do the cutoff?” followed by the denial, “I didn’t.” That a momentary action—whether accidental or mechanical—could bring down a technologically sophisticated aircraft invites critical re-examination of design philosophies. Were the switches ergonomically misplaced? Was tactile feedback insufficient? Did the switch mechanism allow inadvertent engagement during a high workload phase of flight? These are not trivialities, but vital questions of human-machine interface that go to the soul of aviation safety.
There is a moral dimension to this episode that also merits reflection. Suppose the FAA, in 2018, observed vulnerabilities in one Boeing aircraft type. In that case, it raises the question of whether a broader obligation of disclosure—if not redesign—should have been shouldered by Boeing. This responsibility is intensified by the company’s implicit knowledge that operators may not uniformly interpret or act upon inter-model design parallels. The principle of prevention is better than liability is not merely a commercial cliché—it is a maxim that finds resonance in both tort and contract.
My Take
In the broader sweep of international civil aviation, the tragedy of Flight 171 is more than an accident—it is a parable on the limits of technology in the face of human frailty, a reminder that in the pursuit of safety, vigilance must forever remain unrelenting.
Ultimately, the tragedy of Flight 171 was not merely the result of an isolated lapse but appears to reflect systemic failure—a failure of knowledge dissemination, of design foresight, and of operational diligence. If aviation is to uphold its standing as the safest mode of transport, it must do so through relentless transparency, anticipatory engineering, and uncompromising operational scrutiny. The manufacturer must never assume that the burden of design ends with certification, nor should the airline assume that silence equals safety.
In the final analysis, the aviation community must accept that safety can no longer be pursued reactively—awaiting the sting of tragedy before awakening to the need for reform. The tragedy of Air India Flight 171 is a clarion call to embrace a higher order of vigilance: one anchored in anticipatory and predictive intelligence. It is no longer sufficient for manufacturers to rely solely on historical data and certification thresholds; they must deploy dynamic safety analytics that detect latent threats across aircraft families, systems, and human-machine interactions. Operators, for their part, must cultivate safety ecosystems that do not merely respond to incident data but constantly interrogate operational assumptions through real-time monitoring, fleet-wide trend analysis, and scenario-based simulations. Regulators, too, must evolve from arbiters of compliance into architects of resilience, fostering data-sharing protocols and predictive oversight.
At the heart of it all lies a single truth: that every life carried aloft must be protected not just by technology, but by foresight. Only when safety is no longer a pursuit but a precondition—woven into the very epistemology of design, operation, and governance—can we hope to avert the silent tragedies that await in the void of inattention.
The memory of 260 lives must now animate a reinvigorated ethos of accountability—not as an act of blame, but as a necessary step toward reclaiming the public trust that every flight solemnly inherits the moment it lifts into the sky.
