AHMEDABAD — One year on from the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crash that killed two hundred and sixty people — two hundred and forty-one of two hundred and forty-two on board, plus nineteen on the ground when the aircraft struck the student-hostel block of the B.J. Medical College a kilometre and seven hundred metres from the threshold of runway 23 at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport — the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau of India said on Friday that it has made ‘significant progress’ on the inquiry into Air India Flight 171 but is not yet ready to issue a final report. The bureau’s Friday statement, which it released on the first anniversary of the crash and which Al Jazeera reported in full from Ahmedabad, said the AAIB is ‘focused on technical, operational, organisational, and human factors’ and will release the final report ‘upon completion of all investigative activities and requisite international review.’ No date was set.
The first-anniversary commemorations Friday were the day’s other principal event. Families of the dead gathered at the crash-site memorial on the B.J. Medical College campus, attended a lawyers’ and aviation-expert conference at the Ahmedabad bar association in the afternoon, and lit candles after sunset at the site itself. The crash, which occurred at 1:38 PM India Standard Time on June 12, 2025, when Air India Flight 171 to London Gatwick lost both engines thirty-two seconds after take-off and crashed into the hostel block at approximately one hundred and forty knots and barely two hundred feet above ground level, was, by passenger casualty count, the deadliest aviation accident on Indian soil and the deadliest Boeing 787 Dreamliner crash in the airframe’s commercial history. The sole survivor, British national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was seated in seat 11A on the left side of the aircraft.
The AAIB’s fifteen-page preliminary report, which the bureau released on July 12, 2025 — one month after the crash — contained the finding that set the year’s investigative trajectory: the dual fuel cutoff switches in the Boeing 787’s cockpit, the levers immediately to the right of the throttle quadrant that disengage fuel flow to engines one and two, moved from RUN to CUTOFF within ten seconds of take-off and were restored to RUN approximately fifteen seconds later. The engines could not regain spooling speed at the altitude and airspeed the aircraft had reached. The cockpit voice recorder, on the AAIB excerpt published in the preliminary report, contains the exchange: First Officer Clive Kunder asks Captain Sumeet Sabharwal why he had cut off the fuel; Sabharwal replies that he had not done so. The transcript does not contain further dialogue before the impact tone seventeen seconds later.
The published cockpit exchange has been the single most contested element of the investigation. American National Transportation Safety Board officials whose preliminary review of the AAIB’s findings was reported in the U.S. trade press in October 2025 concluded that the most likely operational sequence was that Captain Sabharwal had manually moved the fuel switches — the American findings reflected an early-assessment framing some U.S. coverage rendered as the captain having ‘cut off’ the fuel while First Officer Kunder ‘panicked.’ Indian pilots’ associations rejected the American framing categorically. Captain Charanvir Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots, told the press Friday that the AAIB should not have published the cockpit-voice-recorder excerpt at the preliminary-report stage at all: ‘It will cause more speculation and more misunderstanding,’ he said, repeating the position the federation has been taking since July 2025.
Captain Sabharwal’s father has filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India through senior advocate Indira Jaising, asking the bench to direct the AAIB to: refrain from issuing further interim findings before the final report; expand the investigation to include the Boeing 787’s flight control computer architecture, the General Electric GEnx-1B engine fuel-and-control-unit design, and the operational-and-organisational-factors framework the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Annex 13 requires for category-A investigations; and engage an independent international air-safety auditor. The petition, which the Federation of Indian Pilots joined in October 2025, is listed for hearing in the Supreme Court the third week of June 2026. The legal argument, on the petition’s published text, is that the preliminary-report framing imputes culpability to the captain in a manner the technical evidence does not yet support.
The engine analysis, on which the timing of the final report turns, is being conducted at the GE Aerospace facility in Cincinnati and at the Safran-CFM facility in Villaroche, France. The GEnx-1B engines recovered from the crash site — both of which had sustained the impact with the medical-college hostel block and the post-impact fire — are being examined for the fuel-control-unit position, the failed-spool signatures, and the residual fuel-pressure traces. Bloomberg’s reporting on the U.S. side of the engine work has placed the engine-analysis completion at approximately three months from the June Friday statement. The AAIB has not endorsed that timeline. The Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation has, since the February 2026 incident in which an Air India Boeing 787 cabin crew reported anomalous fuel-switch behaviour on a Mumbai-to-Frankfurt service that the crew resolved before take-off, asked Boeing to examine the fuel-control-switch component in laboratory conditions; the lab report is, on DGCA sources, expected by the end of August.
Air India’s chief executive Campbell Wilson, whose airline was operating Flight 171 as an Air India-branded service following the October 2024 merger of Air India and Vistara, said in a statement released through the Tata Group press office Friday morning that the airline ‘shares the AAIB’s commitment to a complete and authoritative final report’ and that Air India has ‘no operational concerns about the safety of its 787 fleet.’ The carrier has paid the families of the dead an interim compensation of three crore rupees — approximately three hundred and sixty thousand US dollars at the May 2026 exchange rate — with full compensation pending the final apportionment of liability. Air India’s separate UK-jurisdiction settlement with the sole survivor, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was reported in the British press at twenty-one thousand five hundred pounds (approximately twenty-eight thousand and eight hundred dollars), a figure his legal team has publicly contested as inadequate.
The political resonance of the investigation in India has been sharper than the AAIB has acknowledged. The crash occurred in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended the Ahmedabad memorial service in June 2025 and who has, the prime minister’s office said Friday, dispatched aviation minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu to the first-anniversary site. Modi himself is in Europe through the weekend for the G7 Évian summit, with the Sunday-evening cricket window in India-Pakistan T20 World Cup play at Edgbaston also on his itinerary; his presence in Ahmedabad on the anniversary itself, which the Congress-aligned regional press in Gujarat had publicly called for, did not materialise. The Modi government’s foreign-policy week, which culminates Sunday in the planned Iran-US Islamabad Declaration signing in Geneva, has displaced the Ahmedabad anniversary from the front pages of the Hindi-language national dailies in a way the Gujarati-language regional press in Ahmedabad has, on Friday-evening editorials, criticised. The Air India branding that the Tata Group has built into the post-merger fleet identity has, on Indian aviation-press readings, been the second-largest brand-strength casualty of the crash after Boeing’s Dreamliner programme.
The broader Boeing 787 fleet position has been the second-order regulatory question through the year. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has issued a single airworthiness directive on the 787 fuel-control switch population since the crash, in November 2025, requiring inspection of the switch lock-detent mechanism on aircraft with specific serial-number ranges of the Honeywell Aerospace fuel-control-switch assembly. The directive was complied with by every operator on the published worldwide 787 fleet — one thousand and ninety-four airframes in commercial service at the November 2025 fleet count — and no further defects of the lock-detent class have been reported since. The aviation-safety question Boeing has not resolved is whether the lock-detent mechanism was at any point a contributory factor to the AI171 fuel-switch movement, or whether the only operational explanation is human-factors-driven. The AAIB final report is the document the global Boeing 787 fleet’s regulators will use to answer that question.
The Friday-evening candlelight vigil at the B.J. Medical College hostel block, where two hundred and seven of the two hundred and sixty dead were named at the memorial, ended at 9:32 PM IST — the eight-hour mark after the crash on the same date in 2025. The families’ position on the AAIB process, on the conference proceedings published Friday afternoon, is that the bureau has now had a year and that the standard the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Annex 13 sets for category-A investigations is twelve months from the date of the accident. The bureau’s Friday statement, which acknowledged the standard and committed only to ‘completion’ without a date, does not, on the families’ reading, meet it. The Supreme Court hearing later this month will examine, among other things, whether the AAIB’s procedural compliance with Annex 13 is sufficient to maintain the bureau’s investigative independence on a crash whose technical findings will affect a global airframe in commercial service. The final report, when it lands, will not bring back the two hundred and sixty. The question Friday’s vigil articulated is whether the year that has now passed will produce the answer the year was supposed to.
