New Delhi: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has submitted the preliminary report on the AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and concerned authorities, sources said on Tuesday. The report is based on initial findings from the investigation into the Air India plane crash that claimed over 250 lives.
According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, 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.
Sources familiar with the process told ANI that an identical black box, referred to as a “golden chassis,” was used to confirm whether data could be accurately recovered from the damaged black boxes. One black box was recovered from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16.
The investigation is being led by AAIB officials and includes technical members from the Indian Air Force, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), and the US-based National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which represents the country where the aircraft was designed and manufactured.
The Director General of AAIB is heading the probe. An aviation medicine expert and an Air Traffic Control (ATC) officer have also been included in the team. Sources confirmed that the NTSB team is currently stationed in Delhi and is working closely with Indian authorities at the AAIB Lab. Representatives from Boeing and GE are also present in the national capital to assist with the technical analysis.
Before the AI-171 crash, India often sent black boxes of damaged aircraft and helicopters to decoding centres overseas in countries such as the UK, USA, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia. Indian labs previously lacked the equipment and facilities to retrieve data from black boxes following serious aviation accidents.
This has now changed. The AAIB Lab in Delhi is currently equipped to decode both Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) and Flight Data Recorders (FDR) domestically.
In earlier crashes, black box decoding was largely done abroad. For instance, in the 1996 Charkhi Dadri crash, the black boxes were decoded in Moscow and the CVR in Farnborough, UK. In the 2010 Mangalore crash, recorders were repaired and decoded by the NTSB in the US. During the 2015 Delhi crash, decoding was done at Canada’s Transportation Safety Board. Even in the 2020 Kozhikode crash, while the CVR and FDR were downloaded at DGCA’s facility, the data processing was supported by the NTSB.
