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Informist, Wednesday, Apr. 1, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – The Supreme 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 on the Jun. 12 crash of the London-bound Air India flight in Gujarat. 

 

The bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant pulled up petitioner Suresh Chand Shrivastava, a mechanical engineer, for filing the petition. "Why do people file these kind of petitions? What is the deep-rooted agenda? As if we don't know why all this is filed. The families of the deceased are not coming here, but you are. Dismissed", said Chief Justice Kant.

 

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.

 

Last month, the Delhi High Court had also rejected Shrivastava's petition observing that it was not an expert in dealing with these kinds of issues. "We are not experts and we are not mechanical engineers," the high court had 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 had said.

 

The high court had 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.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Deepshikha Bhardwaj

 

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