Air India crash: Initial report brings no closure for victims' families

Findings raise more questions, provide few answers to what really happened

- Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj

NEW DELHI - Mr Ravi Thakur was delivering lunch tiffin to doctors at a hospital when a passenger aircraft took off from a nearby airport and, moments later, crashed into a dining facility where his mother, Mrs Sarla Ben Thakur, worked as a cook.

The crash and subsequent inferno killed her, along with Mr Thakur's daughter, Adhya.

There had been a small swing for Adhya in the corner of the kitchen, where she could be watched while her parents were out delivering the food her grandmother cooked.

In the weeks since the June 12 crash in Ahmedabad, India's worst aviation disaster in nearly three decades, Mr Thakur's time has been spent seeking answers to how such a thing could happen: a plane falling from the sky, killing at least 260 people, including all but one of the 242 on board.

The preliminary investigation report released on July 12 - the day the family would have celebrated Adhya's turning two - left families, including Mr Thakur's, unsatisfied.

The report said fuel supply was cut off to both engines within seconds of take-off, and that the airplane started losing thrust before it had even crossed the airport's perimeter.

But it had no answers as to how the fuel switches were flipped, or why. The report included only a brief, confusing snippet of the conversation recorded in the cockpit between the pilots, where one asks whether the other moved the fuel switches, to which the second responds that he had not.