Officials Clashed in Investigation of Deadly Air India Crash
Tension, suspicion and poor communication between U.S. and Indian experts have marked the continuing inquiry into crash of Boeing 787 Dreamliner
When two American black-box specialists landed in New Delhi in late June, urgent messages arrived on their phones.
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.
Jennifer Homendy is the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu is India’s minister of civil aviation.jonathan ernst/Reuters; Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
“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.”
The plane crashed into a residential area, killing a total of 260 people. SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images
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.
Left, an example of undamaged fuel-control switches. Right, the damaged fuel-control switches from the Air India crash. Investigators studied the position of the switches in the wreckage and flight-data recorders.AAIB
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.
www.bbc.com
