New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday (July 28) decided to hold off further investigation into the Air India AI-171 crash until the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) publishes its final report, which is slated to be ready between mid-September and end-October this year.The June 12, 2025, crash at Ahmedabad airport was one of the most deadliest aviation disasters in India’s history and claimed the lives of all crew members and passengers on board except for one, along with 19 students, on whose hostel building the plane crashed.A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said the plea seeking a Court of Inquiry or a more independent probe was not being shut down, but merely postponed until after AAIB’s findings are analysed for credibility and comprehensiveness. Among the petitioners demanding a “fair, transparent and technically-sound investigation,” is 91-year-old Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, the father of Sumeet Sabharwal, one of the pilots on the aircraft.Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that even though the petitioners had pressed for an independent agency to conduct an inquiry in line with international aviation protocols from the beginning, the bench had previously opted not to intervene with the ongoing AAIB investigation, which was reported to have “significantly progressed” by then.Representing the petitioners, advocate Prashant Bhushan flagged what he called a conflict of interest, arguing that three of the five officials on the AAIB’s investigation team were drawn from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), despite the agency’s own rules calling for a body free of DGCA representation.Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the centre and the DGCA, rejected this characterisation and argued that petitioners’ claims made it seem like the DGCA was “concealing something,” when experts from countries whose nationals died in the crash had also been part of the process. “This is not like some in-house investigation here,” he said, as per The Hindu. He said the reason for the final report’s delay, which has long bypassed its expected deadline of one year, was the time taken to ship the aircraft parts overseas to manufacturers for testing, A report by The Wire had earlier noted that the flight’s engines were still being examined in the United States in mid-June, contributing to the obscurity surrounding the report’s release.The bench additionally directed the AAIB to take into account the technical evidence submitted by the pilots’ federation, which is one of the petitioners in the case, on the sequence of the Ram Air Turbine’s (RAT) deployment in the AI-171 flight – an emergency generator that automatically activates when both primary and backup electrical systems stop functioning.Sabharwal’s plea alleges that the RAT was “prematurely activated” at take-off even before the pilots could have made any inputs, sharply contradicting the AAIB’s preliminary findings that pushed for the ‘pilot suicide theory.’He also called for a deeper scrutiny of the CCTV footage suggesting the higher probability of an electrical or systems failure rather than human error.