Need a Regulator for Flying Coffins

Welcome aboard India's booming aviation sector. Please fasten your seatbelts, stow your illusions, and brace for impact.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

Indians are flying blind. On June 12, 230 passengers boarded Air India Flight 171 in Ahmedabad. Thirty seconds after takeoff, the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner plunged into a medical college hostel. It wasn't just a crash—it was a massacre, and one that could have been prevented. And like so many others in India's increasingly dystopian aviation landscape, it exposed not just the condition of the aircraft but the rot at the very heart of our aviation ecosystem.

In any functioning democracy, such a tragedy would be a moment of reckoning. But not in India. Instead, distraught relatives ran from morgue to morgue, clutching photographs of burnt bodies and unanswered questions. For days, there were no officials with answers. There was no crisis response team. Hardly a responsive centralised helpline, which should have been mandatory.

The main crisis that allows airlines to get away with murder is that there is no regulator fixing accountability. Sympathy without empathy is a sign of apathy. Add indifference at the helm, and the picture is complete: four senior executives threw an official party days after the crash. Thankfully, they were sacked. And the conscience cancelled perceived callousness, with the Tatas setting up a foundation with a huge ₹500-crore corpus to look after the interests of the victims.

Let's drop the polite fiction. This wasn't a tragedy. This was premeditated negligence dressed up as routine incompetence. India's aviation sector isn't flying high—it's spiralling into a tailspin of regulatory cowardice, corporate greed, and political indifference. And the blood is everywhere: on the tarmac, in the air, and on the hands of those who allowed it.