Air India crash: Pilot’s father moves Supreme Court seeking judicial inquiry

The father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the pilot-in-command who was among the 275 persons who died in the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad on June 12, has moved the Supreme Court seeking a court-monitored judicial inquiry into the incident, Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

The writ petition was jointly filed by 91-year-old Pushkaraj Sabharwal and the Federation of Indian Pilots on October 10.

It seeks the setting up of an independent investigative committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge, with aviation and technical experts as members, PTI reported.

The petitioners contend that the investigation being conducted by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau and the head of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation is “defective, biased, and technically unsound”, the news agency reported.

They allege that the preliminary report released on July 12 “rather than undertaking a comprehensive technical investigation, appears to have disproportionately focused on the deceased pilots, who can no longer defend themselves and overlooked plausible evidence of electrical, software, or design-level failures”.

The petition further contended that the five-member probe team was composed largely of officials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and state aviation authorities whose own oversight procedures are under question, making them effectively investigators in their own case.

“It violates the fundamental principle of natural justice, i.e. nemo judex in causa...

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