Pushkaraj Sabharwal requested a fresh investigation into the crash after arguing that the ongoing process was “non-independent”.
He said two officials from the AAIB had implied that his son was the one to cut the fuel, despite the government denying this allegation and insisting that their investigation was “very clean” and “very thorough”.
“They asserted that the [cockpit voice recorder] analysis implicated Capt Sumeet Sabharwal in the accident and inquired about the reasons for the alleged actions,” he said.
Mr Sabharwal told the investigation that his son was a highly qualified and trained pilot, who “regularly passed all [Directorate General of Civil Aviation]-mandated medical examinations”.
Sumeet Sabharwal joined Air India in 1994 and logged 15,638 hours of flying time, having recorded 8,596 of those on the 787 aircraft. He flew a Boeing 777 before training to fly the newer Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in 2014.
Following the crash, The Telegraph reported that the pilot’s mental health was being examined by investigators after the death of his mother and separation from his wife.
But his father told the investigation team that his son was “not under any emotional distress”.
He has accused the investigation officials of being “biased” and causing unsubstantiated blame to the pilot, who cannot defend himself.
His father has also raised the questions on the “unexplained Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployment prior to crew inputs”.
The RAT is an emergency generator that automatically deploys when both primary and backup electrical or hydraulic systems fail.
As per the preliminary report, the “RAT deployed at take-off, before the pilots could have made any control inputs or touched the fuel switches,” he said.
“This premature activation is a direct indicator of an electrical or digital malfunction, contradicting the preliminary report’s inference that pilot actions initiated power loss.”
Sabharwal had never been involved in any major incident in his career until the disaster on June 12.
