Gone in 32 Seconds

{ONE}

MUKTI ARJUNSINH VANSADIYA’S PARENTS were a study in contrast on the morning of 12 June 2025. Her mother, 60-year-old Divya Vansadiya, was bubbling over with excitement—“like a child,” Mukti told me. Divya and her husband, Arjunsinh, were due to fly to London that afternoon to meet Mukti’s elder sister. Mukti had wanted it to be a special experience for them and had carefully chosen the flight they were on. “I wanted them to have that Dreamliner experience,” she said. The Boeing 787 is a modern wide-body aircraft with a massive cabin and nine-seat rows, something that would have felt “grand, comfortable and memorable.” Arjunsinh, a farmer from the rural outskirts of Surat who had never flown before, was nervous, apprehensive. Mukti sat him down to reassure him. “Airlines have one of the best safety records,” she remembers telling him. “It is not like roads where you have accidents every day, papa.”

Her parents’ flight, Air India 171, was one of the shortest in aviation history: 32 seconds in total, from take-off to crash. Alongside the couple, 239 passengers and crew died, with another 19 on the ground when the plane crashed into a hostel block of BJ Medical College, less than two kilometres from Ahmedabad’s airport. As I spoke to Mukti, she kept thumbing a photo of her mother in her twenties. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Mukti asked. “Why did this happen?” That is a question that haunts Mukti and hundreds of other families about AI171—the second deadliest aviation disaster in Indian history.

The aviation establishment seemed to coalesce early on an answer. Two days before the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, an agency overseen by India’s ministry of civil aviation, was due to submit its preliminary report, the Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive. It was titled “Air India Probe Puts Early Focus on Pilots’ Actions and Plane’s Fuel Switches.” Citing “people familiar with U.S. officials’ early assessments,” the article said that the preliminary investigation suggested the pilot had manually cut off the switches sending fuel to the engine. But the report had an unusual way of establishing this. On 12 July, the day of the deadline, the AAIB released its report at 1 am—no press conference, no technical briefing, no investigators taking questions. Just a 15-page unsigned, undated, document not directly blaming the pilot but suggesting, with cherry-picked data, that he had cut the fuel to the engines.