To say it is a monumental tragedy is a gross understatement. A London-bound Air India flight, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, carrying 242 people, including crew, burst into a ball of fire after crashing into a medical college less than half-a-minute after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel international airport in Ahmedabad on Thursday afternoon. This plane crash, the worst in India in this century, left 241 passengers and crew members dead. Only one passenger had a miraculous escape. The collateral damage is equally numbing. As the ill-fated plane rammed through hostel buildings of BJ Medical College adjoining the airport, 24 people, including medicos, lost their lives on the ground, taking the toll to 265. This Thursday tragedy shocked the nation and heightened anxiety about air travel. However, the sheer scale and complexity of the tragedy can be gauged from the fact that there was no official communication on the number of deaths even after midnight though crash took place around 1.40 pm in the afternoon. For some reasons, there was some reluctance on the part of the authorities to disclose the death count!

The crash obviously raises doubts about the safety protocols that Air India practices. Its poor safety record continued even after Tata Group took over the state-owned airliner in 2022. Furthermore, the safety aspect of Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft is also under cloud now. The aircraft, considered an engineering marvel and fuel-efficient one, faced significant quality issues after it entered commercial service in 2011. To address the quality issues, the US airplane maker had to stop Dreamliner’s deliveries between January 2021 and August 2022. The latest crash shows that a lot more needs to be done. Nevertheless, the Ahmedabad plane crash is obviously a big blow to India’s fast-growing civil aviation sector. The country is the third largest market globally when it comes to passenger traffic. On the air cargo front too, India is the sixth largest one. With focus on expanding the aviation infrastructure and new airports in the country, the sector is poised for rapid growth in coming years. But these types of plane crashes dent people’s trust in air travel. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the central government to quell the doubts among air travellers about the safety in the civil aviation space in India.

Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu did the right thing when he announced that an expert panel would be constituted to study the civil aviation safety in the country and suggest measures for its improvement. He made this announcement soon after inspecting the crash site. Statutory bodies like Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), a part of Ministry of Civil Aviation, will carry out their probes into the fatal crash. However, the proposed expert panel will go beyond this crash and look at the whole gamut of the aviation safety ecosystem in the country. But the Minister should ensure the implementation of its report in totality. To be frank, aviation safety protocols in India are not of global standards. Frequent air travellers in the country know this very well. It is a known fact that airline staff handle many safety-related issues with utter callousness. The tragic disaster of Air India’s Boeing Dreamliner 787 turning a ‘deathliner’ in Ahmedabad should be a wake-up for the civil aviation sector, airlines and governments when it comes to air travel safety in the country. It’s high time the country has the highest safety standards in aviation space. That’s the need of the hour.