The Crash
12 June 2025 will go down in the annals of aviation and travel as a sad day.
Drawing on reports from the media, flight AI 171—a Boeing 787‑8 Dreamliner carrying 242 passengers crashed shortly after departure from Ahmedabad at 13:38 local time on June 12, 2025. Data from FlightRadar24 revealed the aircraft climbed to just 625 ft before its transponder went silent. Tragically, eyewitnesses in the Meghani Nagar district heard multiple explosions as the plane crashed into a building adjacent to the airport perimeter, igniting billowing plumes of black smoke and igniting a fire in what appeared to be a hostel structure.
Emergency responders swiftly mobilized, and injured passengers were rushed to nearby hospitals. The airport was temporarily closed, and all flights have since been suspended.
The media corroborate that among the 242 onboard were 169 Indian nationals, 53 British, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian, alongside two pilots and ten cabin crew. High-level condolences poured in: India’s PM Narendra Modi called the crash “heartbreaking beyond words,” UK PM Keir Starmer described it as “devastating,” and Air India chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran expressed deep sorrow and pledged full support for rescue efforts and affected families.
Conjectures
As the dust settles on the catastrophic tragedy of Air India flight AI 171, and the blackened fuselage lies in dismembered fragments across the urban sprawl of Meghani Nagar, attention turns to the formidable and exacting task of determining how such a calamity could befall a modern Dreamliner—an aircraft celebrated for its technological sophistication. According to reports of experts, this modern airliner, 1100 of which are in service for the past 11 years, has had a sound safety record and recently just carried its one billionth passenger.
In the immediate aftermath, experts in aviation operations, flight data analytics, and structural engineering have begun cautiously positing what may have transpired, acknowledging that only the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) will reveal the definitive narrative. One popular theory, based on available video recordings, suggests that the flaps—which should have remained in the takeoff position for at least 10 to 15 minutes after departure—appeared to have been retracted prematurely. This may have compromised the aircraft’s lift. Additionally, the undercarriage (wheels), which is normally expected to retract into the fuselage within 10 to 15 seconds of takeoff, did not do so. These anomalies may have contributed to the aircraft stalling during its initial climb. It must be emphasized that this is only speculation at this point and should not be ascribed as the cause until an investigation is completed. Such an investigation would take a couple of years to complete, although within 30 days, a preliminary report would be released, merely giving details of the occurrence.
The Investigation
As the accident occurred in India, it will lead the investigation. Also involved could be the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States (since the aircraft is registered in the US); Boeing (the manufacturer); General Electric (the engine manufacturer), and, since the aircraft was bound for the United Kingdom, the UK authorities as well.
In the meticulous realm of international civil aviation, the task of ascertaining the cause of an aircraft accident is neither perfunctory nor retributive. Rather, it is a solemn and technically exacting pursuit aimed solely at the prevention of future occurrences. This epistemological underpinning is enshrined in Annex 13 to the Chicago Convention, which prescribes the framework for accident and incident investigations. The Annex, structured to be understood by a wide array of professionals across jurisdictions, affirms that the primary objective of any inquiry is the enhancement of safety, not the assignment of blame. It elaborates on which States are entitled to participate—namely, those of occurrence, registry, operation, design, and manufacture—and defines their rights and responsibilities, thereby ensuring procedural integrity and international cooperation even in moments of tragedy.
The legal scaffolding of Annex 13 is interwoven with Article 26 of the Chicago Convention, which obliges the State of Occurrence to initiate an inquiry, subject to national laws. An ICAO Council resolution adopted in 1951 further harmonized these provisions, formally recommending that States use the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) in Annex 13 when conducting investigations into accidents involving death or serious injury. While the Convention permits deviations under Article 38, certain procedural guarantees are inviolable—for example, the State of Registry must be allowed to appoint observers, and must receive the resulting reports. Moreover, when technical defects in aircraft or navigation systems are suspected but no fatalities have occurred, States must revert to their national procedures until ICAO provides further guidance. In this manner, the balance between national sovereignty and global safety imperatives is delicately preserved.
Legal Aspects
One of the key issues that such an event brings to bear is communication and assistance to victims and their dependents and loved ones. It is in this context that the statement of the Chairman/CEO of Air India (referred to at the outset of this essay) becomes important.
As the head of insurance of an international airline who had to handle a disaster in 1985 involving fatalities, I am aware of the importance and sensitivity of the human element and the necessity of complying with the legal rights of those involved. Compensation with regard to the Air India disaster comes within the purview of the Montreal Convention of 1999, which both India (the point of departure) and the United Kingdom (the point of arrival) ratified in 2009 and 2004, respectively.
In the realm of international air carriage, Article 21 of the Montreal Convention of 1999 marks a significant evolution from the earlier applicable legal regime – the Warsaw regime – by introducing a dual-tier liability structure for passenger injury and death. Under this arrangement, the first tier imposes strict liability on the carrier, requiring no proof of fault up to a specified threshold. Beyond this threshold, the second tier provides the carrier a defense against liability, provided it can establish that the damage was not due to its negligence or wrongful act or omission. This construct represents a calibrated equilibrium between the rights of passengers to just recompense and the commercial viability of the airline industry, ensuring that victims receive prompt and fair compensation without overwhelming carriers with disproportionate burdens. For the legal practitioner, a nuanced understanding of these liability thresholds and how they interact with evidentiary standards and potential defenses is essential, especially in complex cases involving parallel or overlapping jurisdictions.
The Convention acts as a gatekeeper of legal coherence by precluding the pursuit of claims outside the Convention’s scope. This exclusivity clause reinforces the Montreal Convention’s status as a self-contained legal regime, preempting recourse to domestic tort systems or consumer protection statutes. The policy objective here is unmistakable: to eliminate the legal uncertainty and forum manipulation that plagued the Warsaw system. Courts, therefore, must resist the temptation to import extraneous doctrines into Convention-based litigation and instead uphold the textual integrity and teleological purpose of the Convention. The treaty reflects a jurisprudential commitment to legal predictability, ensuring that liability for air carriage incidents is adjudicated within a harmonized global framework.
The Convention, in addition to providing for upfront payments to victims and relevant persons until their claims are settled, provides for five distinct fora in which a passenger (or dependent survivor) may bring a claim—introducing the so-called “fifth jurisdiction,” namely, the passenger’s principal and permanent residence, provided the carrier operates services to or from that State. While this provision undoubtedly enhances access to justice by allowing plaintiffs to litigate in familiar and convenient jurisdictions, it also introduces the risk of forum shopping, where claimants might seek out courts with more generous damage awards or favorable legal standards. It is incumbent upon the judiciary to construe this provision with restraint and discernment, preserving the Convention’s objective of uniformity while deterring opportunistic litigation practices that could distort the balance the drafters so meticulously endeavored to achieve.
My Take
In the wake of the harrowing tragedy that befell Air India Flight AI 171, the aviation world stands, once more, at an inflection point—facing not only the immediate grief of lives lost and families shattered, but also the moral and operational imperative of what must be done next. It is too easy, and too common, for the sector to lapse into reflexive defensiveness or procedural platitudes in such moments. But this moment calls for more than the issuance of condolences or the invocation of “standard operating procedures.” It demands introspection, innovation, and institutional courage.
The priority must be the elevation of investigatory integrity. The lessons of AI 171 must be extracted with meticulous care, in a process free of political posturing or nationalistic hubris. As prescribed under Annex 13 of the Chicago Convention, the investigation must transcend mere causality and function as a blueprint for systemic reform. If the preliminary reports suggesting mechanical anomalies or operational inconsistencies are substantiated, the implications could extend far beyond Air India or Ahmedabad. They may very well challenge our assumptions about training protocols, fleet maintenance, cockpit situational awareness, and even aircraft design. The age of the Dreamliner does not preclude the reality that innovation without vigilance can be its form of negligence.
Moreover, the wider community of States—particularly those of Manufacture, Registry, and Operation—must rise to this moment through cooperation rather than protectionism. What we need now is not a retrenchment into silos of national sovereignty, but a reaffirmation of internationalism in aviation safety. Every flight is a shared enterprise; every airspace, a commons. Going forward, the path must include the refinement of emergency response protocols, the expansion of real-time telemetry and diagnostic data sharing, and a culture in which transparency is not the exception but the norm. In the memory of those lost aboard AI 171, the industry must move forward—not merely by flying again, but by flying better.
