India's accident bureau says 'significant progress' has been made on the 787 fuel cutoff mystery, but a year on there is no final report, no named cause, and a leak driven blame fight doing work the investigation has not done.
One year ago today, Air India Flight AI171 lifted off from Ahmedabad bound for London Gatwick. Within seconds, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's fuel-control switches moved to the 'cutoff' position, both engines lost power, and the aircraft fell back to the ground. Of the roughly 241 people on board, all but one were killed, along with 19 people on the ground. A year later, India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau has not issued a final report, has not named a cause, and has, in a brief statement marking the anniversary, told families only that 'significant progress' has been made and that the final report will be released 'upon [its] completion,' with no date attached (BBC News).
The anniversary, in other words, did not bring answers. It brought a procedural question that the investigation has so far declined to answer in public: what does a credible, timely, due-process-respecting accident inquiry owe 260 dead, the families who have spent twelve months in limbo, and the two pilots who cannot speak for themselves, when the only public evidence that has shaped the blame conversation came not from a finding but from unnamed sources?
The factual scaffolding of the case is narrow and well documented. The AAIB's preliminary report, published on 12 July 2025, established that, seconds after takeoff, the fuel-control switches in the 787's flight deck abruptly transitioned to 'cutoff,' starving both engines of fuel and triggering total power loss (BBC News). The preliminary report stopped short of assigning a cause. It described the switch movement, noted the design of the switches, and left the central question, who or what moved them, explicitly open.
Six weeks after the crash, the most consequential piece of evidence in the public domain is a cockpit voice recording. According to reporting summarised by the BBC, the recording captured one pilot asking the other why he had cut off the fuel supply, and the second pilot replying that he had not. AAIB has not identified which pilot spoke first, and the bureau has not attributed the switch movement to either crew member. That detail has not stopped the blame conversation from moving ahead of the bureau.
The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, citing unnamed sources familiar with the recording, have reported that the cockpit exchange supports the view that the captain moved the fuel-control switches to cutoff. Captain Sumeet Sabharwal's name has appeared in that coverage, but only in those media reports and not in any official finding. Indian pilots' associations have rejected the suggestion outright, criticised the unnamed-source reporting, and questioned whether the AAIB's own handling of the cockpit material has been tight enough to prevent leaks from doing the work of a finding. The bureau's anniversary statement does not address the controversy, and the central question of who or what moved the switches remains, on the official record, unanswered.
What the anniversary puts back in view is not a new theory of the crash. It is a question about how an investigation handles the gap between 'we don't yet know' and 'someone, somewhere, is being told we do.' A credible inquiry in the first twelve months after a 260-death disaster owes the families a public, evidence-led account of what its investigators have actually ruled out, and what they have not. It owes the crew a process that does not let unattributed reporting settle the question of deliberate action before any finding is published. And it owes itself a pace and a publication plan that the bureau can defend in public, not only in the final report.
The AAIB says it is making progress on aircraft systems, flight recorder data, engine-related components, and maintenance and operational records. That is a reasonable list of workstreams, and the preliminary report's cutoff-switch finding is the right place for the bureau to focus. What the anniversary has not produced is any indication of when the final report will appear, what findings the bureau considers settled, and how it is managing the leak problem that has put a captain's name in the headlines without a finding to anchor it. Until those questions are answered in public, the anniversary will keep being a date on a calendar rather than a milestone in the inquiry.