The Air Accident Investigation Bureau of Investigation (AAIB) presented the preliminary report on the AI -171 accident in Ahmedabad to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the officials concerned, stated by sources on Tuesday.
According to sources, the report is based on the initial findings of the investigation of the Air India aircraft accident in which more than 250 people were killed.
According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Crash Protection Module (CPM) was safely recovered from the front black box, and on 25 June 2025, the memory module was successfully accessed and its data was downloaded to the Aaib Lab. Sources familiar with the process told ANI that a uniform black box, referred to as “Golden Chassis”, was used to confirm whether the data could be recovered from the black box. One black box was recovered from the roof of a building on 13 June at the accident site, and the other from the debris on 16 June.
The investigation is headed by AAIB officials and includes the Indian Air Force Technical Member, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) from the United States, which is the official discovered agency of the country’s design and construction of the aircraft.
The Director General of AAIB is going into the investigation. An aviation medical expert and an air traffic control officer have also been included in the investigation team. Sources confirmed that the NTSB team is currently posted in Delhi and is working closely with Indian officials at AAIB Lab. Officials of Boeing and GE are also present in the national capital to assist in the technical process.
Prior to the accident of Air India Flight AI -171, AAIB used to send black boxes of damaged aircraft and in some cases, even helicopters for foreign decoding centers in countries such as UK, USA, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. Indian laboratories previously lacked equipment and dedicated facility to recover black box data from serious aviation accidents. It has now changed, and the Aaib Lab in Delhi is fully equipped to decod both the Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Records (FDR) within the country.
In earlier crash, black box decoding was mostly done abroad. In 1996, in the Charkhi Dadri accident, the Black Box was decoded by IAC in Moscow and CVR in Farnborough, UK. In the 2010 Mangalore accident, the recorder was repaired and decoded by NTSB in the US. In the 2015 Delhi accident, Decoding was done in the Engineering Lab of the Transport Safety Board of Canada. In 2020 Kozhikode crash, CVR and FDR were downloaded in DGCA flight recorder feature, but data was processed with the help of NTSB. (AI)
