In a step that has caused an uproar in the country and caused Air India stocks to collapse, the Union Civil Aviation Minister, K. Rammohan Naidu Kinjarapu has taken the unprecedented step of confirming before a crowd that the recent, tragic plane crash was a direct consequence of egregious and systemic negligence by the national carrier.
In the hastily called and tense press conference held in New Delhi, the Minister dropped the line of neutrality government had been taking on the matter, and said that the preliminary report, which is to be officially released next week, carried conclusive evidence of an appalling malfunctioning of standard operating procedures and a break-even failure in pre-flight safety inspection that had been directly responsible in causing the calamity.
The utterance made by the Minister with a touch of deep disappointment shredded up the story that the accident was merely because of some uncontrollable technical failure or some outside influence. He claimed that internal audit audits indicated that there were a number of unheeded safety alerts within the weeks before the catastrophe, and that a critical element, which could be readily replaced and whose failure was determined, was flown by a maintenance crew that was under pressure to meet tight deadlines.
There was no black box lying, declared Minister Naidu, his voice incising itself upon the silent room. “This was not an act of God. It was the failure of humans and institutions. Those lives lost by Air India due to its laxity and the government will see that accountability is absolute and swift.
This is a bombshell confession that has immediately led to a huge political and corporate scandal. The Opposition parties have used the statement of the Minister, insisting on the resignations of the top management of Air India as well as the demand of the complete judicial investigation of all safety standards of the entire fleet.
The resulting blowback risks putting not only the airline, but also the whole civil aviation regulation system, into the spotlight with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) becoming the subject of a major question of its oversight. Minister Naidu has committed to ensure that the initial report will be made open and no longer under the concealed of the bureaucratic machine which has always postponed the truth in such issues.
To the bereaved families, the Minister words, which, though damning, restate their worst fears, pave the way to massive litigation against the airline at once. Naidu then ended his speech by promising the citizens that the government will do all it can through the law to fix the carrier and that the punishment to those who caused the issues both at the ground and in the corporate suites will be very harsh and will act as a stern reminder to the whole industry. He claimed that the investigation will now take a new line of direction as it does not concentrate on the actual happening but on the identity of those who made it possible and this is a turning point in this national tragedy.
