The 91-year-old father of the fatal Air India flight’s captain said officials from the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) visited him last month and suggested that his son cut the fuel to the plane’s engines after takeoff, correspondence obtained by Reuters showed.
Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, emailed the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) last week to say that AAIB officials had visited him at home on August 30 “under the pretext of offering condolences”, and implied his son, Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, was the one who moved the fuel switches.
“During this interaction...they went beyond their mandate — speaking in innuendos and insinuating, on the basis of selective CVR (cockpit voice recorder) interpretation and a so-called ‘layered voice analysis’, that my son had moved the fuel c