New Delhi: On June 12, 2025, India faced one of its worst aviation disasters. As many as 260 people died as the Air India flight 171 crashed into buildings and a massive fireball erupted. Twelve months on, the families of the victims and crew still await answers, and what they have got so far circumvents guidelines.The one‑year statement of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, the division of the Ministry of Civil Aviation which investigates aircraft accidents and incidents in India, was issued on the anniversary of the crash. It opens with a solemn tribute and the assurance that the investigation is being conducted under India’s Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017, and “the standards and recommended practices contained in ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] Annex 13.” It notes that a preliminary factual report was released on July 12, 2025, and describes the last 12 months as “an extensive and rigorous examination of all relevant technical, operational, organisational and human factors associated with the accident.”Remarkably little official information has entered the public domain since the crash. Apart from the 15-page preliminary report released a month after the accident, investigators have disclosed few substantive findings. The preliminary report outlined a sequence of events in the aircraft’s final seconds – including fuel-control switch movements, deployment of the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) and a brief cockpit exchange between the pilots – but stopped short of explaining why those events occurred and drew no conclusions about probable cause. With the final report still pending more than a year later, that document, released a year ago on June 12, remains the principal official account of what happened aboard Air India 171.The AAIB’s interim statement arrives at this juncture and falls well short of what Annex 13 of the ICAO, the United Nations agency that sets global standards for air accident investigations, expects from a genuine “interim statement,” and investigation veterans say it fails both the letter and the spirit of the rules meant to protect public safety.Annex 13: What Paragraph 6.6 actually requiresAnnex 13 is explicit about what must happen when a Final Report on an aircraft incident is delayed beyond 12 months. Paragraph 6.5 says the government conducting the investigation “shall make the Final Report publicly available as soon as possible and, if possible, within twelve months.” Paragraph 6.6 then adds a hard back‑stop: if that report is not out within a year, the government “shall make an interim statement publicly available on each anniversary of the occurrence, detailing the progress of the investigation and any safety issues raised.”The rationale is that Annex 13 does not treat accident investigations as exercises in assigning blame, but as tools for preventing future accidents, say aviation experts. The requirement for annual interim statements is intended to ensure that potentially important safety lessons are not locked away for years while investigations continue. By requiring investigators to disclose progress and any safety issues identified, ICAO seeks to allow airlines, regulators and manufacturers to take corrective action before a final report is published. Also read: Exclusive: A Year After Ahmedabad Crash, the DGCA Unit Meant to Keep Planes Airworthy Is Half-Empty‘Significant progress’ is not ‘detailing’Simon Hradecky, editor of The Aviation Herald and an electronics and aviation engineer, says that AAIB’s interim statement simply does not meet the threshold set by Paragraph 6.6. “Saying the investigation made ‘significant progress’ is anything but a detailing of the progress,” Hradecky notes. In his view, and in line with how serious investigations normally operate, a compliant interim statement should at minimum set out what investigative steps have been completed, describe the main factual results obtained so far, identify which work streams are ongoing, and indicate what further steps are planned.“In my opinion – and I have seen many interim reports doing exactly that – an interim statement should start from the preliminary report and add all the new information to it,” Hradecky says. He points to the investigation into the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 as a textbook example. The crash took place on June 1. French investigators published Interim Report 1 on July 2, 2009, Interim Report 2 on December 17, 2009, and Interim Report 3 on July 29, 2011, with each report expanding on the factual record and analytical findings of its predecessor before the final report was issued. AF447: How Annex 13 can workThe AF 447, travelling from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, to Paris in France, saw the Airbus craft crash into the Atlantic Ocean after entering an aerodynamic stall at 36,000 feet, killing all 228 people on board despite both engines continuing to operate. France’s BEA’s first interim report, released just weeks after the crash, ran to more than 100 pages and covered the flight history, crew qualifications, maintenance records, weather, Air Traffic Control communications, wreckage recovery and search efforts.Later interim reports added ACARS fault messages, pitot tube issues, maintenance logic, crew training, fatigue rules and Air France’s operational procedures. ACARS or Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System is the digital messaging system through which aircraft automatically transmit fault messages and operational data to airlines and maintenance teams via satellite. In the case of Air India 171, the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), which represents more than 6,000 pilots and is a petitioner before the Supreme Court, has similarly argued that the aircraft’s final ACARS transmissions should be placed on record, saying the messages could provide important clues about the aircraft’s condition in the moments before the crash.One interim report in the AF 447 crash also included a crucial passage on the “Unreliable IAS (indicated airspeed)” manoeuvre, effectively showing that the crew had been trained for the procedure at lower altitudes but faced the emergency at high altitude, in a regime for which they were not adequately prepared.In Hradecky’s reading, that interim passage briefly told the deeper truth of AF447: that the crash was not simply about the first officer Pierre Bonin pulling the nose up, but about the inadequacy of training, procedures and design setting the crew up for failure. The final report, he says, softened that framing.The French court’s recent decision finding Airbus guilty of manslaughter in connection with AF447 is, for many pilots, the ultimate confirmation that the early narrative – the one that hung everything on the first officer Bonin’s actions – was dangerously incomplete. What looked at first like “pilot error” has now been legally recognised as a chain of systemic failures for which the manufacturer bears criminal responsibility.Also read: Two Pilots Dead in 48 Hours as India Sits on Unimplemented Flight Safety RulesThat history casts a dark shadow over how India is treating Air India AI‑171 and its captain. With 260 people dead and a modern 787 written off, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal has become the easy focal point for blame: the last human in the loop, the name on the licence – exactly the kind of lone, convenient culprit AF447 has since shown to be a dangerous illusion.While the AAIB report is vague in its description of events, the report stops short of blaming the pilot. Appearing before the Supreme Court on November 13 last year, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said the Ministry of Civil Aviation had already clarified that “blame was not attributable to anyone” and that “there is no question of blaming anyone in the report.” However, once the pilot-blame narrative emerged, it was everywhere. Beginning with The Wall Street Journal‘s July 10, 2025 report, published two days before the AAIB’s preliminary findings became public, a series of articles increasingly framed the investigation around pilots and fuel switches. These reports – dated July 11, July 17 and August 26 – did not cite data or evidence and were entirely dependent on anonymous sources.Reuters headlined its coverage ‘Air India crash report shows pilot confusion over engine switch movement.’ The BBC headline read, “pilot error.” Many reports by The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and others increasingly focused on Captain Sabharwal, his personal life and anonymous-source claims about cockpit actions. By the time government lawyers were telling the Supreme Court that the AAIB report did not attribute blame to anyone, much of the international media had already spent months telling readers that investigators were focused on the pilots.‘Rule’ when convenient, ‘guideline’ when notFor Joe Jacobsen, deputy director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety, which has released key evidence pointing to electrical problems on crash flight VT-ANB, the problem with AAIB’s statement is systemic rather than semantic. “Annex 13 is treated as a rule when convenient, and as a guideline when not convenient for the parties involved,” he observes. The time‑bound requirement to issue a substantive interim statement exists for a reason: “The purpose of having a time guideline is to identify and fix the safety problems” while operators are still flying the same aircraft, on the same routes, with the same procedures.An interim statement that offers no more than a vague assurance of “significant progress” satisfies neither the safety purpose nor the accountability test, he says. The Vishwash Kumar exampleSam Thomas, president of the Indian chapter of ALPA, pushes the argument beyond strict text to investigative culture. “Some things are common sense,” he says. “There’s no Annex 13 rule that says the eye‑witnesses in a crash can be interviewed eight months later.” And yet AAIB waited until March 29, 2026, to formally interview eyewitness Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the lone survivor, months after the accident. “Why didn’t AAIB interview him immediately after the crash; when his recollections and memories were fresh?” asks Thomas. For him, this is exactly what it means to ignore the spirit of Annex 13: treating its standards as a checklist rather than as a framework for rigorous, timely, safety‑driven inquiry. “This is more about following the spirit of what Annex 13 lays out,” he concludes.Taken together, those choices – a content‑free interim statement, and critical witnesses interviewed long after the fact – paint a picture of an investigation that is formally open but substantively opaque. The technical machinery of Annex 13 is present on paper, but the discipline and urgency that give it meaning are conspicuously absent.The Wire has reached out to the AAIB asking for details on the timeline, comments on its lack of transparency and exact details on what it has investigated in the last year. It has also reached out to the DGCA, asking it about its oversight of AAIB, whether it has implemented any interim risk controls based on preliminary findings and the lack of its communication with operators, crews, and the public. This report will be updated if we get a response.Rachel Chitra is an independent journalist.