A grim wake-up call for aviation safety & crisis communication

In one of the most tragic aviation disasters in recent times, an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, with 242 people on board, headed for Gatwick Airport in England, crashed after taking off from Ahmedabad's Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. Of the passengers, only one miraculously survived, though authorities were still searching the accident site, the hostel of a medical college, to rescue any injured on the ground, and to determine if the around 200 bodies recovered so far could include both passengers and people killed on the ground.

This would be a tortuous and time-consuming process, given that some of the bodies had been charred beyond recognition. Equally urgent is the necessity to determine the cause of the crash of what otherwise was a routine flight. One has to bear in mind that Air India operates a fleet of more than 190 planes, including 58 Boeing aircraft, thus there is an exigent requirement to conclusively place this accident as a one-off incident, thereby reassuring fliers of the safety of the Air India fleet.

It may also be noted that the safety record of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner has been impeccable, with this flight being the first case of one being destroyed in a crash. Boeing being the biggest supplier of aircraft to Airline companies across the world, the global aviation industry, too, must be convinced of the safety of its products.

A clear-cut conclusion as to the cause of this disaster would serve to quieten the cacophony of speculations, which has burst out in the national electronic media and social media. This is even more pertinent given that India had recently been in conflict with neighbour Pakistan and, therefore, the possibility of sabotage cannot entirely be ruled out.

Reportedly, the only survivor among the passengers has told authorities that he heard a loud bang just after the plane took off, and what caused this will have to be established. Some experts hint at the possibility of an extremely rare double engine failure, while others think that pilot failure or bird hits might be possible causes.

What exactly happened to Flight Al171 will only be revealed by a detailed investigation, and it is good that the Union government is constituting a high-level committee comprising experts from multiple disciplines to examine the mishap in a thorough manner.

It is also befitting that the manufacturers Boeing is dispatching a team of experts to help the Indian investigators, as is the aircraft's engine-maker GE Aerospace, whose experts will analyse the cockpit data. In the coming days, a complex investigation involving the plane's black box-which records flight data and has already been recovered - and an examination of debris will commence. One certainly hopes this will finally lead to an indisputable verdict as to what had caused such a tragic disaster.