Indian Pilots Federation Threatens WSJ With Legal Action Over AI-171 Crash Story

The Federation of Indian Pilots plans to issue a legal notice and pursue a defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal over an article that attributes last month’s Air India AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad to pilot error, the group’s president, Captain C. S. Randhawa, said on Thursday. Randhawa called the U.S. newspaper’s report "baseless," arguing it relies on unnamed sources and misrepresents early investigative findings, thereby damaging the professional reputations of Indian flight crews. He added that the pilots’ body would seek to hold the publication accountable unless it retracts or substantiates its claims. The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner went down shortly after take-off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport on 12 June, killing 241 of the 242 people on board. A preliminary report from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau confirmed that both fuel-selector switches were found in the cut-off position but stopped short of determining whether mechanical failure or human action was responsible. The bureau’s full inquiry is still under way.