New Delhi: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) told a Parliamentary committee on Wednesday that it will make public its preliminary report on the Ahmedabad plane crash in a couple of days, sources said.
AAIB Director General G V G Yugandhar told the panel that it will upload the report within 30 days of one of the worst aviation disasters in recent decades and the first crash involving a Boeing Dreamliner.
Concerns over aviation safety dominated the proceedings of the Parliamentary committee headed by JD(U) MP Sanjay Kumar Jha, as over 97 representatives covering almost the entire gamut of the sector, including official agencies, airlines and other stakeholders, shared their views with Parliamentarians in the day-long meeting.
Air India’s Boeing 787-8 aircraft operating flight AI 171 en route to London Gatwick had crashed into a medical hostel complex soon after take-off from Ahmedabad on June 12, killing at least 260 people, including 241 persons aboard.
The sources also said that no preliminary report has been submitted by AAIB to the civil aviation ministry.
Under the ICAO norms, AAIB can submit a preliminary report within 30 days of the accident to it. Jha described the meeting as “very extensive and thorough”, noting that every stakeholder participated in the discussion and answered queries of the panel’s members.
Officials told that panel that this is the first time the black box of a crashed plane is being investigated in India, noting that they have shored up their technological know-how in recent times and are consulting foreign experts, including those from Boeing, as required. The US government has helped with the platform needed to decipher the data, and the aviation secretary had led the coordination efforts.
They said the black box and voice recorder of the ill-fated aircraft were intact, and the data was being
investigated.
Official sources said that the MPs were of the view that the regulator and the safety infrastructure have not kept pace with the growth of the country’s aviation sector, noting that Air Traffic Control oversees nearly 30 flights on a radar compared to the norm of eight to 10 in many places.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has over half of its sanctioned strength vacant, they added.
“A common concern is that amid the rapid growth of the Indian aviation sector, with its plane strength likely to rise to 2,500 in four years from the current nearly 800 and more airports coming up, the overall maintenance and safety requirements have not kept pace. This needs to be addressed,” an MP said.
He referred to a string of chopper crashes in Uttarakhand, especially in the route serving pilgrims to Kedarnath, and noted that quite a few of them were due to human errors, including a case where the pilot was untrained and another when a helicopter hit a vehicle parked near the landing. This issue also drew the panel’s concern.
Some MPs faulted Air India and official agencies for not being communicative enough with the public following the Ahmedabad crash to restore their confidence.
Asked about the impact of the crash, which was followed by several operational incidents, on the aviation sector, officials said the domestic traffic fell by over eight per cent, but international traffic fell by less than a per cent, the sources said.
Some members also pointed out the “haphazard” growth around several airports, including densely populated areas, due to rapid urbanisation, the sources said.
The Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, which oversees the functioning of the civil aviation sector, held its last meeting on the issue of safety on Tuesday and is likely to table its report in Parliament in the session beginning July 21.
Air India CEO and MD Campbell Wilson was among the representatives of airlines, including Indigo and Akasa, who attended the meeting.
Many of these officials were part of the meeting of another Parliamentary committee held on Tuesday.
On June 26, the civil aviation ministry said AAIB promptly initiated an investigation and constituted a multi-disciplinary team headed by the AAIB chief on June 13 in line with prescribed norms.
The team includes an aviation medicine specialist, an Air Traffic Control (ATC) officer, and representatives from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), it had said in a statement.
“On the evening of June 24, the team led by AAIB DG with technical members from AAIB and NTSB began the data extraction process. 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,” the ministry had said.
It had added that a high-level multi-disciplinary committee, headed by the Union Home Secretary, is examining the causes that led to the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad, and will also suggest comprehensive guidelines to prevent such incidents in the future.
Members who attended the meeting included BJP MPs such as former Union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Surendra Singh Nagar and Tapir Gao and Congress’ K C Venugopal, Kumari Selja, Neeraj Dangi and Imran Pratapgarhi, among others.