Officials clashed in investigation of deadly Air India crash

Don’t go with the Indians, their colleagues told them.

Earlier that day, Indian authorities had told their American counterparts of a new plan to unlock the mysteries behind the first deadly crash involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

They wanted the U.S. technical experts to take a late-night flight on a military plane and then drive to a remote area. At an aerospace company’s lab there, the experts were supposed to analyze flight-data and cockpit voice recorders pulled from the wreckage of the Air India jet that crashed nearly two weeks prior, killing all but one of the 242 on board.

But that plan for the recorders—commonly called the black boxes—worried Jennifer Homendy, a top U.S. transportation official. She and other American officials were concerned about the safety of U.S. personnel and equipment being taken to a remote location amid State Department security warnings about terrorism and military conflicts in the region.

The National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman made a flurry of calls, including to Sean Duffy, President Trump’s transportation secretary, as well as the chief executives of Boeing and engine-maker GE Aerospace.

At her request, the State Department sent embassy officials to intercept the NTSB recorder specialists at the airport, and the Americans stayed in Delhi.

The previously unreported episode marked a high point of tension between Indian government officials, who are leading the probe into the June 12 crash, and the American experts assisting them. The investigation has been marked by points of tension, suspicion and poor communication between senior officials of the two nations, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the probe and internal documents.

In June, in the crucial early days of the investigation, Homendy complained about delays in downloading data from the Air India flight and insisted Indian officials extract information from the Air India black boxes at their facility in Delhi or at the NTSB’s lab in Washington, according to the draft of an unsent letter from Homendy to Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu, India’s minister of civil aviation, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“I urge you to give our team the best chance of success at helping your government understand what occurred on Air India Flight 171 and prevent it from happening again—our only goal," she wrote.

Instead of sending the letter, she wound up making the same points in phone calls and also threatened to pull American support for the probe, according to people familiar with the matter. Indian officials relented and agreed to download the black-box data in Delhi instead of the remote lab.

The friction has been fed by each country’s high stakes in the investigation, which is continuing and could take a year or more. The private view among many American government and industry officials is that the evidence so far points to Air India Flight 171’s captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, who died in the event, having deliberately crashed the plane.

While some are optimistic Indian authorities will conduct a thorough and transparent probe, others said they worried the Indian government wouldn’t accept such a scenario, or would instead raise the prospect of aircraft or engine problems being major factors, as some countries have with other suspected pilot suicides that result in mass death.

Some Indian observers, meanwhile, have faulted the West for emphasizing pilot moves, whether accidental or intentional, and overlooking potential flaws in the American-made planes. Seven years ago, Boeing pointed to pilot and maintenance slip-ups while playing down problems with a faulty flight-control system in deadly crashes of its 737 MAX jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Accident investigators later determined the design flaws in the jet played major roles in the crashes, leading to a global grounding of the MAX fleet, as well as a federal criminal investigation, congressional probes and billions of dollars in costs for Boeing.

The Dreamliner, the model in the recent crash, is one of Boeing’s most successful products, giving it an edge over its European rival Airbus in the market for wide-body jets. The jets are popular among the world’s airlines and are commonly used on international, long-haul flights.

An association of Indian pilots called for a review of electrical systems on Boeing planes and the grounding of 787s operating in the country after an emergency power system deployed in early October on another Air India Dreamliner. The same system had deployed on the June flight that crashed. India’s aviation regulator asked Boeing for more information about unexpected deployments of the device.

Push for data

Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from an airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. The plane appeared to lose thrust before plummeting into a hostel for medical students. In all, 260 people died, including 19 on the ground.

While Indian officials are leading the crash probe, the NTSB has played a supporting role under international protocols because the jet and its engines were manufactured in the U.S. and American regulators certified it for passenger service. The U.S. agency led a team of investigators and technical experts that included representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and GE Aerospace.

But friction quickly surfaced after the first Americans arrived in Ahmedabad on June 15. Inside a government building at the airport, G.V.G. Yugandhar, chief of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, wanted the Americans to know Indian authorities were capable of handling the complex probe. Yugandhar said India was a proud country and touted its new lab for reading black boxes in Delhi.

“We’re not a Third World country," Yugandhar told them, according to people familiar with his remarks. “We can do anything you all can do. We have the same capabilities."

At the crash site, Indian authorities initially wouldn’t let American investigators take their own photos of the wreckage, according to people familiar with the matter. They also moved some of the wreckage before U.S. investigators could examine it.

The Indian investigators also were proceeding with certain aspects of the probe in sequence, rather than concurrently.

The Americans thought the Indians weren’t prioritizing downloading and analyzing the black-box information. U.S. investigators thought that was the most important to exposing a broader safety threat, if one were to exist. The data could reveal the need for fast action, up to potentially grounding the Dreamliner fleet. In 2013, the FAA had halted flights of Dreamliners for about three months after a pair of battery fires.

A person familiar with India’s investigation process disputed that, and said officials pursued various aspects of the investigation simultaneously.

In the U.S., FAA and airline officials grew frustrated with the slow pace of information emerging from the investigation. “We’re champing at the bit to get the data," one FAA official in Washington said at the time, as days stretched on after the crash without a black-box readout.

An analysis of the plane’s flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders was needed for investigators to determine why the engines appeared to lose thrust quickly after takeoff. When Indian investigators showed their U.S. counterparts the accident plane’s throttle assembly, the fuel-cutoff switches were in the run position, indicating the jet’s engines were getting fuel at the time of impact. Switches can move on impact, so investigators would need to check their position as reflected in the flight data.

Homendy attempted to reach out to her counterpart, Yugandhar, for updates on the black boxes, but her attempt went unanswered, according to people familiar with the matter. The NTSB also tried to set up a virtual meeting between Yugandhar and a U.S. safety official, but Yugandhar didn’t log on.

Indian authorities released little public information and limited access to the materials. False information, some apparently generated with artificial intelligence, filled the void online.

Theories swirled among aviation experts about what might have led to the crash. Why did both the 787’s engines simultaneously lose thrust right after takeoff? Could fuel have been contaminated? Did computer systems in the highly automated wide-body jet somehow malfunction?

At one Western airline, officials sought to re-create the accident in a simulator but couldn’t. “Was it some weird electric quirk we didn’t know of?" said a person familiar with the airline’s tests. After seeing no other explanation, the person said, the officials wondered whether the Air India crew might have simply shut off the engines shortly after takeoff.

U.S. experts

The NTSB team in Ahmedabad relocated to Delhi in anticipation of helping the Indian authorities download flight and cockpit-voice data from the 787’s black boxes. Indian officials had requested the NTSB provide more than 30 pieces of specialized equipment they needed to extract the data, according to Homendy’s draft letter, which was dated June 24.

Then came the sudden plan to relocate to the small town of Korwa. Once NTSB officials told Homendy of the plan to get on the military plane around midnight, the chairwoman had a blunt message: “Don’t get on it." She told her team to have Yugandhar call her directly, which he did, according to people familiar with the call.

Indian officials believed the Korwa facility had more capabilities, and they expressed concern that the Delhi facility would attract media attention. Homendy offered Washington as a location, assuring them reporters wouldn’t be inside the NTSB’s lab there, according to the people.

She eventually delivered an ultimatum: If the Indians don’t decide between Delhi and Washington as a location within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support from the investigation.

The Indian AAIB, the investigation bureau, soon decided to download the black boxes, using the special equipment from the NTSB, at its lab in Delhi. It was a facility that opened in April to fanfare, a move aimed at helping the country’s fast-growing aviation sector to maintain safe operations.

The data showed someone in the cockpit moved the switches that cut off the engine’s fuel supply.

The data also showed that Sabharwal, the captain, didn’t pull back on the yoke in the final moments of the accident, according to people familiar with the matter and part of an investigative document reviewed by the Journal. The first officer, Clive Kunder, who was the pilot directly responsible for flying, did pull up at the end.

Days went by after the flight recorder download, further fueling frustrations among American government and industry officials until the AAIB released its preliminary report on July 11.

Indian authorities said in the report that one pilot asked the other why he moved the engine-cutoff switches, while the other pilot denied doing so. The report didn’t identify which pilot said what, or determine whether moving the switches was accidental or intentional.

The switches were moved one second after the other, and were switched back to “run" about 10 seconds later, the report said.

“These 10 seconds will be argued, debated, studied, and scrutinized for decades to come," Patrick Lusch, the FAA’s lead investigator in the probe, said in a LinkedIn comment that has since been deleted.

U.S. government and industry officials believe the captain likely moved the switches to cut off fuel supply, the Journal has reported. The captain remained calm while the first officer seemed to panic, exclaiming in the final moments, “Oh s—!" according to people familiar with an air-traffic control recording.

Safety Matters Foundation, an aviation-focused nonprofit, filed a lawsuit in September asking India’s Supreme Court to set up an independently monitored probe of the crash, according to Pranav Sachdeva, lawyer for the group.

The organization said it was concerned that the preliminary report from Indian authorities prematurely directed responsibility toward Sabharwal, the captain, and would deter deeper investigation of the airline and aircraft manufacturer.

Sabharwal’s father, along with the Federation of Indian Pilots, a national body, also filed a suit to establish court oversight of the investigation. “Speculative remarks" about the pilot “amount to character assassination of a pilot with an unblemished 30-year career," the pilot’s father separately wrote in a letter to the federation of pilots, asking for help in protecting his son’s reputation.

Focus on pilot

The crash increasingly appeared to be the latest in a grim string of crashes caused by “pilot suicide" and mass murder, according to American government and industry officials.

Such crashes have accounted for a stubbornly high share of commercial aviation fatalities over the past three decades, as flying has become increasingly safe. Advances in automated cockpit features have largely stamped out certain types of crashes. But government and industry officials say there is limited ability to engineer out nefarious intent. Some safety advocates say requiring cockpit cameras would help resolve ambiguity. There are also calls to address pilots’ mental health.

Findings of pilot suicide have been controversial and the subject of disagreement between American investigators and other countries. In the case of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, U.S. investigators concluded intentional acts by a pilot caused the crash, while Egypt disputed those findings. In other cases in which no official conclusions have been reached, such as China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, which crashed in China in 2022, U.S. officials suspect a pilot deliberately crashed the plane.

After India’s preliminary report was released, Yugandhar and Homendy both released statements in mid-July criticizing media coverage as premature and speculative before the Indians completed their investigation. The AAIB chief said it wasn’t “the time to create public anxiety or angst" regarding the safety of the Indian aviation industry.

Boeing representatives quietly brought sample fuel-cutoff switches to the FAA’s headquarters in Washington. A goal was to demonstrate how the switches are difficult to move accidentally, according to people familiar with the matter.

Soon after, U.S. regulators began making clear they didn’t have concerns about a technical problem with the global Dreamliner fleet, indicating there was no apparent design or manufacturing flaw to fix. The FAA, Boeing and GE Aerospace aren’t actively working on any related fixes for the 787 or its engines, people familiar with the matter said.

Bryan Bedford, the FAA’s administrator, said in late July the Air India probe indicated no broader problem with the 787 fleet. “We feel very comfortable that this isn’t an issue with inadvertent manipulation of fuel control," he said.

Write to Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com