The crash of Air India Flight 171 on 12 June 2025, 32 seconds after departing Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport bound for London Gatwick, claimed 241 of the 242 people on board and killed a further 19 on the ground, making it the deadliest aviation accident of the 2020s and the first fatal hull loss suffered by a Boeing 787 Dreamliner since the aircraft entered commercial service in 2011. The single survivor, a passenger seated near the rear of the aircraft, was pulled from the wreckage of a doctors’ hostel belonging to B. J. Medical College, into which the aircraft plunged after losing thrust from both engines within seconds of becoming airborne.
The sequence of events was reconstructed from data recovered from the aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. At 13:38 Indian Standard Time, the Boeing 787-8 rotated normally from Runway 23 carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew. Three seconds after liftoff, both GEnx engines lost thrust simultaneously — a failure pattern consistent with fuel starvation rather than a mechanical fault. The preliminary investigation report, released on 12 July 2025 by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, concluded that the fuel control switches for both engines had been moved from the RUN position to the CUTOFF position at that critical moment, interrupting fuel supply to the engines and rendering recovery impossible at so low an altitude. The CVR recorded one pilot asking the other “Why did you cut off?” and receiving a denial in response, a fragment of audio that has since become central to a deeply contested reconstruction of the final seconds of the flight.
The preliminary findings prompted significant controversy within the aviation community. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that investigators had concluded the captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, had likely moved the switches intentionally, a conclusion that India’s airline pilots’ federation disputed vigorously, arguing that the preliminary report relied on paraphrased rather than verbatim CVR transcriptions and failed to account for the full scope of available evidence. The final investigation report had not been published as of early 2026, and the question of whether the switch movement constituted deliberate action, a reflexive error, or an inadvertent contact during a high-workload phase of flight remained formally unresolved.
The crash carried particular significance for Boeing, whose 787 programme had accumulated an otherwise strong safety record across more than a decade and some 200 million flight hours. The Dreamliner had previously been associated with a series of high-profile technical issues — including battery fires that led to a global grounding in 2013 — but had not previously suffered a fatal hull loss. In the aftermath of the Ahmedabad accident, Boeing whistleblowers renewed calls for greater scrutiny of 787 maintenance and system integrity, though investigators made no findings linking the airframe itself to the cause of the crash. India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation also came under pressure to review the oversight of Air India’s maintenance operations and crew training standards.
The wider implications for aviation safety centre on crew resource management: how effectively the two pilots communicated during the seconds immediately following liftoff, and whether established procedures for managing sudden system anomalies were correctly applied. Safety investigators and regulators around the world were expected to review their guidance on fuel system switch management and incapacitation protocols in the light of the preliminary findings.
Key vocabulary:
- hull loss – an accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair; a “fatal hull loss” is one in which fatalities also occur
- fuel control switch – a cockpit switch that controls the flow of fuel to a jet engine; moving it to the CUTOFF position stops fuel supply and shuts the engine down
- fuel starvation – a condition in which an engine stops producing thrust because its fuel supply has been interrupted, whether through a mechanical fault, mismanagement of fuel systems, or crew error
- cockpit voice recorder (CVR) – a flight recorder that captures all audio in the flight deck, including crew conversations and radio communications; essential for accident investigators reconstructing events
- crew resource management (CRM) – the set of training procedures and communication practices used by flight crews to manage errors, workload, and decision-making, particularly under stress
- preliminary report – an early factual summary of an accident investigation, typically released within 30 days; it sets out what is known but does not assign cause or blame, which is reserved for the final report
- incapacitation – a situation in which a crew member becomes unable to perform their duties, whether through medical emergency, injury, or psychological incapacity; aviation procedures require the other pilot to take control and declare an emergency
CEFR Level C1 / ICAO Level 5-6