On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London Gatwick, crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad. The aircraft lost altitude within minutes and went down in the Meghani Nagar area near the airport, erupting in flames (here, here). It crashed into the hostel building of B.J. Medical College and Civil Hospital, which was housing medical students at the time. Over 240 people were on board, including nationals of India, the UK, Portugal, and Canada (here). Investigation into the causes of the incident is ongoing, led by the DGCA, AAIB, and Air India. Aviation authorities later recovered both black boxes from the wreckage—one of which was damaged, while the other remained intact.
In this context, an audio clip claiming to be a cockpit recording from the crashed flight has gained traction on social media. The voice in the clip issues a Mayday call, stating that the plane is about to crash. It is being claimed that this audio was recovered from the black box of the crashed Air India Flight AI 171 in Ahmedabad. Let’s verify the authenticity of this claim.
Claim: An audio clip of a Mayday call was recovered from the black box of the crashed Air India Flight AI 171 in Ahmedabad in June 2025.
Fact: The viral audio is not from the Air India crash. It has been available online since 2009 and is linked to a different flight (N9851L), with no connection to the AI 171 incident. The reports confirm that while both black boxes from AI 171 have been recovered, no audio has been released so far. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To find the truth, we closely examined the cockpit audio clip and noticed the flight number “N9851L” mentioned in the recording. A search for this flight led us to a full-length cockpit audio of flight N9851L, which includes the same audio heard in the viral clip. The video was uploaded to YouTube on 1 June 2009, and at the 1:18 timestamp, the same Mayday call can be clearly heard. This confirms that the audio is not related to the recent Air India AI 171 crash.
Another search for flight number N9851L led us to the flight tracking website FlightAware, which shows that the aircraft is currently owned by the US-based Westosha Flying Club, which acquired it in 1986. In contrast, the Indian crashed aircraft was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner owned by Air India. This further confirms that the viral audio clip has no connection to the Air India AI 171 crash.
According to recent reports (here, here, and here), data from the black boxes of Flight AI 171 was successfully retrieved and downloaded at the AAIB lab in Delhi on 25 June 2025. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were found at the crash site on June 13 and 16, respectively, and transported securely. A multidisciplinary investigation team, including members from India’s AAIB and the U.S. NTSB, is now analysing the data to identify the cause of the crash and enhance future aviation safety. No audio clips from the retrieved data have been released by the authorities.
To sum up, a 2009 cockpit Mayday call audio clip is falsely shared as being from the AI 171 Dreamliner that crashed in Ahmedabad.
