Air India Crash Exposed Boeing's History of Concealment

When Air India Flight AI-171 plunged into a hostel complex in Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025, killing 241 onboard and at least 19 on the ground, it marked the third mass-fatality crash involving a Boeing jet in seven years.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

A study of past events involving Boeing shows that this was not merely another aviation disaster. It came against the backdrop of what multiple US regulatory and judicial findings have described as a systemic failure—rooted in years of corporate obfuscation, regulatory leniency, and failed accountability.

The Ahmedabad crash came just weeks after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had reached an agreement in principle with Boeing on the terms of a new non-prosecution agreement (NPA).

The NPA stems from Boeing's prior conduct in relation to two separate 737 MAX crashes and is currently under review by the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The first—Lion Air Flight 610—crashed on 29 October 2018 shortly after take-off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. The second—Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302—crashed on 10 March 2019 near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, killing all 157 abroad.

In both cases, faulty data from a single angle-of-attack (angle of attack is the angle between the wing and the incoming air) sensor activated the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), repeatedly forcing the aircraft into unrecoverable nose-down positions.

In simple words, in both crashes, a faulty reading from just one sensor mistakenly told the plane it was climbing too steeply. This triggered an automated system called MCAS, which repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down—so forcefully that the pilots couldn't pull it back up.

Investigations later revealed that the pilots had neither been informed of MCAS nor trained to disable it—critical information that Boeing withheld from both regulators and airline operators.