FirstAlerts
Plane CrashesVersion 2

AAIB to File Draft Final Report on Ahmedabad Air India Crash in October, Supreme Court Told

The Boeing 787-8 crashed on takeoff at Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025, killing 260 people according to both outlets; the cause has not been determined.

By AI ReporterFirst reported Jul 28, 2026, 6:23 a.m. ETUpdated Aug 4, 2026, 7:40 p.m. ET

More on this incident

The aircraft involved in the crash at on 12 June 2025 has been identified. An official accident case record — NTSB case DCA25WA232, matched on the date and city — lists the registration as . Indian aircraft registry records list as a , a twin-engine jet landplane, serial number 36279, registered in India, with the registered owner recorded as ; the owner of record is not necessarily the operator of the flight, the pilot, or otherwise connected to it. The flight — reported as by The Economic Times and as by The Hindu BusinessLine — was an bound for London Gatwick that crashed during , killing people, according to both outlets. Both reported that the aircraft was operated by pilot-in-command Captain Sumeet Sabharwal and co-pilot Captain Clive Kunder, and that former Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani was among those killed. Geographic reference data places the location in , Gujarat, at a terrain elevation of 167 ft, 5.2 miles SW of Sardar Vallabh Patel International Airport (VAAH/AMD). The cause has not been determined. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau's investigation remains open; both outlets reported that the AAIB has told the Supreme Court its draft final report will be filed in a sealed cover in the first week of October, that four simulation tests have been conducted, and that the bureau cited an "absolute statutory prohibition" on disclosing cockpit voice recordings. Petitions seeking an independent, court-monitored investigation are posted for hearing on 13 October. Official case records list five earlier occurrences involving as operator or owner: ENG20WA008, Airbus A321 VT-PPT, at Raipur, India, on 8 November 2019; DCA19WA015, Boeing 787 VT-ANE, at Hong Kong, on 20 October 2018; DCA19WA196, Boeing 777 VT-ALN, at New Delhi, on 15 October 2018; DCA17WA218, Boeing 737 VT-AYB, at Cochin, India, on 5 September 2017; and DCA17WA107, Airbus A320 VT-IDB, at New Delhi, on 17 April 2017. Those records are history only and say nothing about the cause of this accident. is India's flag carrier, founded in 1932 as Tata Airlines and returned to the Tata Group in January 2022, when Talace Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, acquired a 100% stake, according to Tata group and corporate material. The company's filed senior post-holders include Senior Vice President – Safety, Security and Quality Capt Henry Donohoe and Senior Vice President Flight Operations Capt Manish Uppal, according to announcements; the investigation has made no finding connecting either to this accident.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Reference data

From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.

Registration
VT-ANB
Type
Boeing 787 8 — twin-engine jet landplane
Registered owner
Air IndiaThe owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight.
Terrain elevation
167 ft
Nearest aerodrome
5.2 miles SW of Sardar Vallabh Patel International Airport (VAAH/AMD)

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 57 Aug 2026, 14:00

    Dropped the geographic reference paragraph on Ahmedabad's elevation and nearby airport as redundant to the facts already stated; no factual changes.

  2. Version 44 Aug 2026, 23:40current

    Headline and dek rewritten to lead with the AAIB's October filing; body unchanged in substance.

  3. Version 37 Aug 2026, 13:58

    Removed the geographic reference-data sentence (the accident is already located at a named city and airport) and reframed the headline and dek around the AAIB's October filing.

  4. Version 34 Aug 2026, 23:28

    Added the named chief executive and managing director to the operator's filed post-holders, with the same no-finding qualification.

  5. Version 24 Aug 2026, 23:40current

    Added headline and dek; corrected the location description to the reference data's bearing (5.2 miles SW of the airport) and tidied the list of prior case records.

  6. Version 24 Aug 2026, 20:09

    Added Air India's corporate registration and registered office and named chairman N. Chandrasekaran among the accountable post-holders, with the no-finding qualification.

  7. Version 14 Aug 2026, 20:09

    First published.

  8. Version 14 Aug 2026, 23:23

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.