Air India crash: AAIB submits preliminary report to Ministry of Civil Aviation, say sources

Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has submitted the preliminary report on the AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the concerned authorities, sources said on Tuesday. According to sources, the report is based on the initial findings of the probe of the Air India plane crash in which more than 250 people were killed.

According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Crash Protection Module (CPM) from the front black box was safely retrieved, and on June 25, 2025, the memory module was successfully accessed and its data downloaded at the AAIB Lab. Sources said that an identical black box, referred to as a “golden chassis,” was used to confirm whether data could be accurately recovered from the black boxes. One black box was recovered from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16.

Who is leading the probe?

The investigation is being led by AAIB officials and includes technical members from the Indian Air Force, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from the United States, which is the official investigative agency of the country of the aircraft’s design and manufacture.

The Director General of AAIB is heading the probe. An aviation medicine expert and an Air Traffic Control officer have also been included in the investigation team. Sources confirmed that the NTSB team is currently stationed in Delhi and working closely with Indian authorities at the AAIB Lab. Officials from Boeing and GE are also present in the national capital to assist with the technical process.

How is the probe done?

Before the crash of Air India Flight AI-171, AAIB used to send black boxes of damaged aircraft and, in some cases, even helicopters to overseas decoding centres in countries like the UK, USA, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia. Indian labs earlier lacked the equipment and dedicated facility to retrieve black box data from serious aviation accidents. That has now changed, and the AAIB Lab in Delhi is fully equipped to decode both Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR) within the country. In earlier crashes, black box decoding was mostly done abroad.

With agency inputs

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