Air India crash: grieving father of captain says investigators blame his son for fuel cut

The father of the crashed Air India flight’s captain said officials from India’s accident investigation bureau visited him last month and implied his son cut the fuel to the plane’s engines after take-off, correspondence obtained by Reuters showed.

Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, 91, emailed the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) last week to say that Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) officials had visited him at home on August 30 “under the pretext of offering condolences”, and implied his son, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, was the one who moved the fuel switches.

“During this interaction … they went beyond their mandate – speaking in innuendos and insinuating, on the basis of selective CVR (cockpit voice recorder) interpretation and a so-called ‘layered voice analysis’, that my son had moved the fuel control switches from RUN to CUT-OFF after take-off,” the September 17 email said.

The day before the AAIB visit, he wrote to the civil aviation ministry – in a letter dated August 29 – to request India’s government open an additional investigation into the deadly crash, criticising what he said were investigators’ “selective” releases of information, which had led to speculation about his son’s actions.

The crash of Air India flight 171 in June, moments after it took off from Ahmedabad, killed 241 of the 242 people on board the Boeing Dreamliner, as well as 19 on the ground.