In AI crash, western media spins stories to pin blame on pilot
Take a cursory look at how this is playing out on shows hosted in the West by widely followed anchors such as Piers Morgan and Megyn Kelly. Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the soft-spoken commander of the ill-fated plane who was monitoring and not flying when the plane crashed, has pretty much been called a suicidal murderer.
I did not know Sabharwal at all, but as an Indian, it makes my blood boil to see this sort of loose talk that is clearly designed to mock the competence of all Indian pilots. The campaign against Sabharwal peaked when The Wall Street Journal converted whispers and insinuations about the senior pilot of the plane into a direct allegation that it was he who cut off the fuel to the engines of the plane by moving the switches.
Imagine the pain and rage you would feel if you were Sabharwal's aging and grieving father, upon reading this about your child. Such media claims, so far, have little to no concrete substantiation and have clearly been written on the basis of leaks by US safety officials who were given access to the probe process in India.
India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Board (AAIB) has finally called out this smear campaign in a statement warning against 'selective, unverified ... irresponsible reporting' in international media. But expect more slander and accusations against Sabharwal in the next few days as the media is fed slanted information bit by bit, piece by piece. The Americans are obviously spinning. Boeing is an American manufacturer that just paid more than a billion dollars in penalties to avoid prosecution — and the protest statement by Indian authorities may be too little, too late.
The problem began with a pointed leak ahead of the release of the report, again to The Wall Street Journal, which set the stage for the pilots to be blamed. Then, two days later, in the dead of night, when it was working hours only for western media and most of India was asleep, the report was digitally released past 1 am. No one quite knows why this was the case. The ambiguously worded, open-ended preliminary crash investigation report was not elaborated on at any press conference.
The report made no direct or explicit allegation against the pilots, but its vague and partial referencing has left the door wide open for endless speculation. It quotes or paraphrases (not clear which) a purported cockpit conversation between the two pilots, with one asking the other, 'Why did you cut off?' and the other replying, 'I did not'. Though no names are taken, because Clive Kunder was flying (and both his hands were at the wheel), Sabharwal is the one under scrutiny in the global press for supposedly cutting fuel to the engines.
And because the report said it had no further recommendations for either Boeing or GE (the engine manufacturer), this was widely read as a clean chit for them, leaving the path open for western media to focus solely on the pilots.
After public outrage and focus on multiple advisories — from the US aviation regulator in 2018 on possibly faulty locks of the fuel switches; from GE in 2020 on a problem with a microprocessor; from the UK in 2025 May, when it renewed a directive flagging a safety concern with fuel valves — India's DGCA joined much of the world in mandating new checks on fuel switches across the Boeing fleet.
If Boeing's claims that their fuel switches were in the clear was really trusted, why are airlines like Etihad and Singapore, along with Air India, running tests again? And if there is a nagging question mark over some of these concerns, why didn't the investigation board recommend these tests as a matter of abundant precaution?
Mary Schiavo, a top US aviation attorney and a former inspector general of the US department of transportation was even more blunt. She told me that on the basis of what we know so far, 'It is impossible to blame the pilots, it is the plane that is suspect unless proven otherwise'.
She and other aviation experts have pointed to a 2019 incident in which both engines of a 787 Nippon Airways plane quit on landing in Osaka without any pilot command. Uncommanded thrust movement, she says, is well documented and this incident mirrors the AI 171 crash, where the pilots deny moving the fuel switches physically.
There is a plethora of pointedly missing information in the preliminary report. The cockpit voice recorder has, of course, been partially quoted. But the time and altitude stamp for when the purported exchange between the two pilots spoke is missing. The time and altitude stamp for when the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployed is also absent. This is critical to understand at what stage the engines failed.
As a senior pilot told me, the probe report should either have been totally confidential or totally open. The halfway house has permitted the entry of vested interests. Boeing's own record on safety is hardly inspiring. After the first crash of the 737 Max, pilots were blamed. It took a tragic second crash for Boeing to concede that its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software had been the problem. Its CEO is on record before the US Congress conceding serious lapses with security.
Yet, the American media focuses on none of this. And in pointing fingers at captain Sabharwal, they do not even consider a plane malfunction or the multiple ignored advisories. Boeing shares rose immediately after the crash report was released and no action or further tests were mandated against its planes.
Meanwhile, Sabharwal's enraged colleagues are left valiantly defending a man who can no longer speak for himself. One of them shared a photograph of a greying Sabharwal from a tech-refresher course at Air India. He topped the course, his crestfallen friend said quietly.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and writer. The views expressed are personal.
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Time of India
22 minutes ago
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The Print
32 minutes ago
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Bihar voter list revision is not anti-democratic—India can't let illegals influence polls
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Some NDA allies, including the Telugu Desam Party, without opposing the SIR exercise outright, have also expressed concerns about its goals. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar—due for assembly elections in a few months—has raised hackles mostly among Opposition politicians. They believe that it is a covert exercise to remove minority voters from the voters' list in order to benefit the BJP and the NDA. So, when the Telugu Desam Party says that the SIR exercise should not be a way to determine citizenship, it is right in a technical sense, but not quite. The EC cannot determine citizenship, but it has the right to know whether someone on the voters' list is a citizen or not. Opposition's mala fide intention The EC says that 99.8 per cent of electors have already been covered in the SIR (till 25 July), and just 1.2 lakh voters have not submitted their forms/documents. That's a very small percentage of missing forms. 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It cannot be anyone's case that people who live elsewhere must be on Bihar's voter list, or that the dead should be represented by fraudulent impostors voting in their names, or that people registered in multiple states should be allowed to vote in Bihar, too, unless those other states first delete their names. No political party will admit to it, but each one wants to see that its potential voters are not excluded. They may have no problems with the other exclusions and deletions. The Opposition parties, which rely heavily on the Muslim vote in Bihar and West Bengal, are not keen to see Bangladeshi citizens who may have gotten into our voters' lists excluded. The BJP in West Bengal, on the other hand, would not like to see the same citizenship scrutiny being imposed on Hindu Bangladeshis, though many of them may be living in West Bengal due to persecution in Bangladesh. 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As long as no eligible voter is excluded, it cannot be blamed. To ensure the latter, all political parties have been given the opportunity to re-insert names they think have been unfairly removed from the draft list. Even after the draft is published on 1 August, voters have time till the end of the month to make corrections. That said, one must point out that voters' lists are not foolproof because the EC does not have enough full-time staff to keep lists updated year-round in all states. Its work begins more or less a few months ahead of a general or state election, and most of the work is done by state officials under the EC's overall direction. Most states will not spare staff a year ahead of elections to do this job of filtering out ineligible voters and adding new ones. 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The history and geography of Assam and undivided Bengal are far too complex for such lazy thinking.' To which Sarma replied boldly, avoiding political correctness. While agreeing with Hegde that the issue was complex, Samra was crystal clear in identifying the problem for what it was: the steady change in religious demography. 'Legally, all of them may not be foreigners. But we, the people of Assam—especially Hindus—are becoming a hopeless minority in our own land. All this has happened over a span of just 60 years. We have lost our culture, our land, our temples. The law gives us no remedy. That's why we are desperate—not for revenge, but for survival. Yes, we may be fighting a losing battle. But we will go down fighting—with dignity, within the law, and for the soul of our Assam. Do not stop us. Just do not stop us from fighting for what is ours. For us, this is our last battle of survival,' he wrote on X. 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Ideally, this process should happen through a well-thought-out NRC, and not only through SIR, but both processes have their legitimacy. The political tensions will continue well into the West Bengal and Assam elections next year. The question is: even if minorities from Pakistan and Bangladesh are given a legal right to return to India, what happens to those who are found to be illegal immigrants, especially Muslims? Will Bangladesh take them back when it has avoided even acknowledging the problem? Any clear determination on whether a Bengali is Indian or Bangladeshi needs Dhaka's cooperation. In the current situation, where the interim Mohammad Yunus government, backed by Islamists, is inherently hostile to India, such cooperation seems unlikely. They can be given the right to work, while being denied the vote. This right to work cannot be indefinite, but it is needed as an interim measure so that India need not deport non-citizens as soon as they are identified. It will also be more humane. Additionally, we can use technology to determine who may not be an Indian national. We can use AI and regional dialect recognition patterns to figure out if someone is from a district in India or Bangladesh. What we cannot do is allow non-persecuted Bangladeshi Muslims to change the demography in the border states when sources close to Mohammad Yunus are already talking about Greater Bangladesh and the takeover of India's north-eastern states. Yunus himself has talked about Bangladesh holding the key to India's north-east. So, far from being a needless exercise, SIR must precede every state or general election. It would help if EC could draw on a painstakingly compiled and regularly updated NRC. No serious nation can afford to compromise its borders or allow ineligible foreigners to influence local politics. R Jagannathan is the former editorial director, Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
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First Post
32 minutes ago
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