In theory, the inquiry should be impartial and informative – a learning process focused solely on improving passenger safety. But in the case of AI171, the information revealed by the investigation so far has triggered a major backlash from safety campaigners, pilots’ groups and lawyers acting for the bereaved relatives.

A key factor in this has been the preliminary report issued by the AAIB a month after the accident. The 15-page document did not draw any conclusions about the causes of the crash, or make any recommendations.

Nonetheless, just two short paragraphs generated a great deal of controversy.

First, it was noted that according to the aircraft’s flight data recorder, the two fuel cutoff switches – normally used when starting the engines before a flight and shutting them down afterwards – transitioned from the run to the cutoff position seconds after take-off. This would have deprived the engines of fuel, causing them to lose thrust rapidly.

The report then says: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.”

This brief statement, provided without a transcript or any indication of who was speaking, sparked intense speculation about the actions of the pilots. Newsweek, for example, focused on the “troubling possibility: that a seasoned captain may have deliberately doomed his jet – and nearly 250 lives”. Former NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt told CBS News the report showed “this was not a problem with the airplane or the engines. Instead…somebody in the cockpit shut the fuel off to those engines.”

A few days later, The Wall Street Journal weighed in. Citing people familiar with the matter, it claimed that recordings of dialogue between the pilots suggested it was the Captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, who had flipped the fuel switches.

It is important to note that this was merely a preliminary report, and within days, the AAIB issued a statement condemning “selective and unverified reporting” in the international press as “irresponsible”. It urged the public and the media to “refrain from spreading premature narratives that risk undermining the integrity of the investigative process.”

By then, arguably, the damage had already been done.

“When a pilot is alive he can defend himself” says Capt. CS Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP). “When the pilot is dead, all the agencies can collude – and they put the blame on the pilot, to save the manufacturer. And this is seen the world over. It’s not the first time”.

His organisation, which represents around 6,000 pilots, condemned the preliminary report as “irrevocably compromised”. Together with Sumeet Sabharwal’s 91-year-old father, Pushkar Raj Sabharwal, they took their concerns to India’s Supreme Court, demanding a judicial investigation into the crash.

In central Manchester, 23‑year‑old Ashleigh agrees with Joel that the state pension is unlikely to be coming her way: “At this rate I don’t think anyone’s ever going to retire, I think everyone will just have to fend for themselves in the end.”

But as someone on a lower income, her pension choices are less squirrel‑like. When working for a big retailer, she says that she chose to stop contributing to her employer’s auto-enrolment pension.

“I opted out of it. I need the money now.” She explains: “I’d rather save for a house and then at least I have something to show for it”.

Some experts warn that the gap between rich and poor in retirement could widen significantly for this generation.

Dr Suzy Morrissey, deputy director at the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI), believes that alongside how much Gen Z save privately, another factor will widen the divide: far more of them will be renting.

“Renting in retirement increases your chances of pensioner poverty, and they do face challenges to save, as younger people, that previous generations didn’t face when they were at the same age,” she says. “If we have people paying rent in retirement who don’t have large pension pots to cover those expenses, then that equals higher risk of pensioner poverty.”

But Morrissey sees a silver lining: pensions auto-enrollment, the system that automatically puts most employees into a workplace pension unless they opt out. If they’ve been employees, “they will have spent their working life contributing into a pension pot, and they will be the first generation that will have spent their whole life doing that.”

It’ll be a backstop for many, but the minimum contribution rate is unlikely to be enough for a comfortable retirement. It’s not automatic for the self-employed and people like Ashleigh have opted out because of immediate financial pressures, so it looks like plenty won’t see the benefit of that silver lining.

Robert Gentil spent several decades working in New York’s stock and trading markets before retiring to Richmond, Virginia.

He is 72 now, and he still gets up early, still checks the markets out of habit, and still keeps a handwritten to-do list instead of trusting his phone to remember things for him. None of that is an accident. It is the same operating system he used on the trading floor, just running on a much quieter machine.

Most profiles of people like Robert lead with the career: the titles, the years, the deals. This one starts somewhere else, with the question that actually explains him: how does someone trained to make fast, high-stakes decisions spend a morning when nothing is at stake at all?

How a career in market analysis shapes daily habits

Robert built his career on market analysis, investment strategy, and risk management. Those are not hobbies you can switch off. He still reads the newspaper each morning with particular attention to business and science, and he still glances at the markets briefly before moving on with his day.

What has changed is the purpose behind it. During his working years, that information fed decisions with real consequences for clients and colleagues. Today, he says the habit survives mostly out of curiosity rather than necessity. He is not managing anyone’s money. He just likes knowing what is happening and why.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A lot of people who spend decades in high-pressure jobs lose the routines the moment the job ends, because the routines were only ever a means to an end. Robert’s held because they were never just about the job. They were about how he preferred to think.

The tools he kept and the ones he let go

During his career, Robert relied on the standard instruments of financial analysis: a Bloomberg terminal, FactSet, spreadsheets built and rebuilt over years. He still checks Bloomberg and Reuters occasionally, but he is candid that his telescope software and astronomy apps have probably become more important to him now. The tools didn’t disappear. They just changed rank.

What patience in markets taught him about everything else

Ask Robert what decades in trading actually teaches a person, and he won’t point to a specific trade. He points to patience. Markets reward people who can sit still during periods of noise and resist the urge to react to every fluctuation. That is a skill, not a personality trait, and he thinks it transfers almost anywhere.

He applies the same instinct to his garden, which does not respond to urgency any better than a volatile market does. He applies it to reading, where he prefers biographies and history over anything that promises a quick takeaway. And he applies it to conversation. Robert is known among his Richmond neighbors as someone who listens before he offers an opinion, a habit he traces back to years of watching markets punish people who talked more than they thought.

Why he measures a good day differently now

For most of his career, a good day had a clear scoreboard. Retirement removed the scoreboard, and Robert has had to build a different one. His version involves smaller, more deliberate measures: whether he learned something new, whether he helped a neighbor, whether he got outside.

He keeps a notebook, a habit he never dropped from his working years, though what goes in it has changed. It once tracked market observations. Now it tracks astronomical ones, along with the occasional idea from a book or a conversation worth remembering. The format stayed. The content moved on.

This is, in a way, the clearest evidence of who Robert Gentil actually is underneath the résumé. The career gave him structure, and he liked the structure enough to keep most of it after the career ended. Few people manage that. Most treat retirement as the opposite of work, a permission slip to stop being disciplined about anything. Robert treated it as a chance to redirect the discipline somewhere that mattered to him personally rather than professionally.

A different kind of expertise

Robert doesn’t present himself as someone with lessons to hand out. But talk to him for even a few minutes and it’s clear he thinks about decision-making the way some people think about weather patterns: as something with visible cause and effect, worth watching closely even when you’re not the one steering. That habit of mind, sharpened over decades in New York’s financial markets, is arguably what Richmond neighbors are really getting when Robert offers to fix a fence, water a plant, or explain what’s visible through his telescope on a clear night. It’s the same mind. It just has a different job now.