Investigation Update on AI-171 Crash
The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has delivered its initial report regarding the AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and relevant authorities, as reported on Tuesday.
Sources indicate that this report is derived from the early findings of the investigation into the Air India plane crash, which resulted in the tragic loss of over 250 lives. The Ministry of Civil Aviation confirmed that the Crash Protection Module (CPM) from the front black box was successfully retrieved, and on June 25, 2025, the memory module was accessed and its data downloaded at the AAIB Lab.
According to insiders, a similar black box, known as a 'golden chassis,' was utilized to verify the accuracy of data recovery from the black boxes. One black box was located on the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, while the other was found among the wreckage on June 16.
The investigation is spearheaded by AAIB officials, with technical experts 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 body for the aircraft's design and manufacture.
The Director General of AAIB is leading the investigation, which also includes an aviation medicine specialist and an Air Traffic Control officer. Sources have confirmed that the NTSB team is currently in Delhi, collaborating closely with Indian authorities at the AAIB Lab. Representatives from Boeing and GE are also in the capital to provide technical support.
Historically, prior to the crash of Air India Flight AI-171, the AAIB would send black boxes from damaged aircraft, and occasionally helicopters, to international decoding centers in countries such as the UK, USA, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia. Indian facilities previously lacked the necessary equipment and dedicated resources to extract black box data from serious aviation incidents. However, this has changed, and the AAIB Lab in Delhi is now fully equipped to decode both Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR) domestically. In the past, black box decoding was primarily conducted abroad. For instance, in the 1996 Charkhi Dadri crash, black boxes were decoded in Moscow and the CVR in Farnborough, UK. Similarly, in the 2010 Mangalore crash, the NTSB in the US handled the repair and decoding of the recorders.
In the 2015 Delhi crash, decoding took place at the engineering lab of Canada’s Transportation Safety Board. In the 2020 Kozhikode crash, the CVR and FDR data were downloaded at the DGCA’s flight recorder facility, but the data processing was assisted by the NTSB.
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