NEW DELHI, July 9: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that it will make public its preliminary report on the Ahmedabad plane crash in a couple of days, sources said.
AAIB Director General G V G Yugandhar told the panel that it will upload the report within 30 days of one of the worst aviation disasters in recent decades and the first crash involving a Boeing Dreamliner.
Concerns over aviation safety dominated the proceedings of the parliamentary committee headed by JD(U) MP Sanjay Kumar Jha, as over 97 representatives covering almost the entire gamut of the sector, including official agencies, airlines and other stakeholders, shared their views with parliamentarians in the day-long meeting.
Air India’s Boeing 787-8 aircraft operating flight AI 171 en route to London Gatwick had crashed into a medical hostel complex soon after take-off from Ahmedabad on June 12, killing at least 260 people, including 241 persons aboard.
The sources also said that no preliminary report has been submitted by AAIB to the civil aviation ministry.
Under the ICAO norms, AAIB can submit a preliminary report within 30 days of the accident to it.
Jha described the meeting as “very extensive and thorough”, noting that every stakeholder participated in the discussion and answered queries of the panel’s members.
Officials told that panel that this is the first time the black box of a crashed plane is being investigated in India, noting that they have shored up their technological know-how in recent times and are consulting foreign experts, including those from Boeing, as required.
The US government has helped with the platform needed to decipher the data, and the aviation secretary had led the coordination efforts.
They said the black box and voice recorder of the ill-fated aircraft were intact, and the data was being investigated.
Official sources said that the MPs were of the view that the regulator and the safety infrastructure have not kept pace with the growth of the country’s aviation sector, noting that Air Traffic Control oversees nearly 30 flights on a radar compared to the norm of eight to 10 in many places.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has over half of its sanctioned strength vacant, they added.
“A common concern is that amid the rapid growth of the Indian aviation sector, with its plane strength likely to rise to 2,500 in four years from the current nearly 800 and more airports coming up, the overall maintenance and safety requirements have not kept pace. This needs to be addressed,” an MP said.
He referred to a string of chopper crashes in Uttarakhand, especially in the route serving pilgrims to Kedarnath, and noted that quite a few of them were due to human errors
This include a case where the pilot was untrained and another when a helicopter hit a vehicle parked near the landing.
This issue also drew the panel’s concern. (PTI)
