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Informist, Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026

NEW DELHI – The Delhi High Court Wednesday rejected a public interest litigation seeking complete details, including the sequence of events with relevant timelines and the exact time when fuel control switches were moved from run to cutoff, in the preliminary report issued by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau on the Jun. 12 crash of the London-bound Air India flight in Gujarat. The court said the prayers made by petitioner Suresh Chand Shrivastava, a mechanical engineer, were misconceived and impermissible for judicial intervention.

 

Observing that it was not an expert in dealing with these kind of issues, the court said the prayers sought cannot be a subject matter of a public interest litigation. "We are not experts and we are not mechanical engineers," the court remarked, adding that it will not reflect well if any negative observation was made by a judicial court on a preliminary report. The report was prepared by experts and even if the same bears any lacunae, a public interest litigation is not a remedy for the same, it said.

 

The court questioned the petitioner on which of his rights had been infringed in his petition. When the petitioner replied that his right to know was being taken away, the court asked him to file an application under the Right to Information Act to seek the details. The high court further said Shrivastava was unnecessarily wasting the judiciary's time by filing such a petition.

 

The Air India flight from Ahmedabad to Gatwick in London had crashed seconds after takeoff, killing 241 passengers and the crew. According to the report by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, the fuel control switches in the cockpit of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had been flipped, starving the engines of fuel. However, the report does not say whether the control switches were flipped by a person or in another way.

 

The Supreme Court was also hearing a public interest litigation by Safety Matters Foundation, an aviation safety non-government organisation, seeking a court-monitored independent investigation into the Air India plane crash. Earlier this month, the apex court had asked the Centre to give a status report on the probe into the crash. The court had also asked the Centre to submit a brief report on whether it was following the procedural protocol in line with international commitments in the probe into the crash. In that case, the petitioner had argued that the preliminary report issued by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau was "incomplete, selective, and lacking in transparency, thereby undermining the credibility of the investigative process and the trust of the travelling public".  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Tanima Banerjee

 

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