Flight AI171 loss aches, yet data shows air travel the safest in India

India Today

8 hours ago

A series of escalating disasters in Metropolis. One of them is a helicopter fallen from the sky and dangling barely from the top of a skyscraper, about to fall. Also dangling in the air is one of the passengers—Lois Lane. It's chaos on the ground. A tragedy is inevitable.In swoops the red-caped hero. He flies up and catches Lois midair. And then, with just one hand, he also grabs the wrecked helicopter and stops it from falling on the people on the ground. 'Statistically speaking, of course, it is still the safest way to travel,' he tells a shocked Lois and flies away.advertisementThat was the first Superman movie, in 1978. That line, statistically speaking, was true then. Almost five decades later, it still is.June 12, 2025 turned out to be an unfortunate day to be airborne. Minutes after take-off from Ahmedabad, Air India Flight AI171—a formidable Boeing Dreamliner—went down; 260 lives lost and a lone surviving passenger. Images of the wreckage, grieving relatives and search-and-rescue work splashed across the globe. It was the type of tragedy that makes a country stop and mourn.
But as the dust settles, a more sobering aspect remains true. Flying is safer than it has ever been in India. It is still statistically the safest way to travel in the country—better than by road or train.That's what hard data says. Take 2023, for instance. Not a single accident per million flight departures took place in Indian civil aviation. For a country as large and disordered, as packed with people, as India, this was no mean feat. And it's been validated globally.India was ranked 48th in a recent assessment by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which audits countries for aviation safety. The country was 102 in 2018. Yet, any step-up in the rankings is more than it's cracked up to be: India's Effective Implementation (EI) Score, essentially how well it enforces aviation safety standards, is 85.65 per cent. In key areas, it's better than of the United States and China. In the sub-category of airworthiness—perhaps the most important of the lot—India got 97.06 per cent.None of this is intended to say that air travel is free of risk. Few things in life are. But the chances of things fatally going wrong on a flight are minuscule, especially when compared with the alternatives.Take, for instance, the roads. Over 460,000 road accidents are reported in India every year. Nearly 170,000 people died in 2022-23—close to 470 a day. Most of those deaths never make news. They happen on highways, in cities and in distant corners of the country. They snuff out children, students, workers, the elderly, often families in entirety.Train travel has had its share of tragedies. In 2023-24, the railways reported 40 major accidents, which killed over 330 people and injured over 800. Indeed, that is a small number when compared with the millions of people who take a train every day. Nevertheless, they are fatalities. And buses? They kill more than 5,600 people on Indian roads each year. That's approximately 3-4 per cent of all road traffic fatalities.advertisementAnd, while no one noticed, aviation did its boring thing—quietly carrying millions of people without a single commercial aviation accident in 2023. That's not luck. It is the product of something much more profound—long-term investment in safety, training and infrastructure. For half a decade now, India's aviation stakeholders—regulators, airlines, airport operators—have been ratcheting up the pressure, keeping vigilant, even if not particularly visible.The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has overhauled pilot training, stepped up inspections and introduced a more assertive approach to surveillance. The numbers say it all. India achieved a 25 per cent drop in high-risk 'airprox' incidents (when planes come too close to each other in the air) in 2023, a 92 per cent drop in ground-proximity (potential collisions of aircraft with terrain or obstacles) alerts, and 23 per cent fewer poorly-stabilised landings. It's not perfect. But it's working.That's what makes the AI171 crash such a jolt. According to the initial cockpit voice recordings, the fuel-control switches for both engines were somehow shut off in flight, which caused the aircraft to lose all power. Investigators are still trying to work out what occurred—whether it was a freak mechanical failure, human error or a series of events that no one could foresee. What is clear is that the fatal crash was the first for a Boeing 787, which began flying in 2011.advertisementIt is also, crucially, a statistical outlier. But in the public imagination, little factoids like that can be obscured by the emotional crush of a disaster. Airplane crashes, as rare as they are, have a tendency to lodge in the mind in a way road accidents do not. Maybe it is the magnitude of the tragedy or the speed of it or even the thought of how helpless passengers are when a plane goes down.But for all sorts of reasons, one plane crash seems to incite infinitely more public outrage than thousands of deaths each year from vehicles on the road. For the past 10 years, Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari has been highlighting everywhere, even in Parliament, that road accidents take more lives than wars and terrorism. By now, the analogy barely registers.advertisementIn fact, India accounts for almost 10 per cent of global road fatalities. Among the young—between the ages of 5 to 29—road accident injuries are the top cause of death, government data shows. And yet, hashtags and headlines and desperate calls for change are all too few.This disconnect matters. When perception and reality don't remotely sync, policy follows the sound, not the demand. But if there's anything Indian aviation's safety record demonstrates, it is that the unglamorous work can pay off.And the world is taking note. Now, several nations are looking to India's model of aviation safeguards—with its mix of state capacity, public-private partnerships and a convergence with global norms. India has adopted the ICAO's National Aviation Safety Plan template; it actively engages in worldwide safety discussions and seems to want to be up to speed with the current global conversations on air safety.None of this changes the terrible loss of Flight AI171. When people die, no amount of data can mean anything to their families and friends. But for the millions still flying every day—to work, to family, to opportunity, it may be worthwhile to know what bigger picture really still looks like.advertisementThat is why, late on July 17, the Indian government's Aircraft Accidents Investigation Bureau, uncharacteristically issued a statement criticising 'a section of the international media' and remarked: 'While the accident of this dimension has drawn public attention and shock, it needs to be appreciated that this is not the time to create public anxiety or angst towards safety of the Indian aviation industry, particularly on the basis of unfounded facts.'One terrible day does not define the skies. The real measure is how safely passengers travel on all the other days. On that count, India's skies are not just open. They are still among the safest in the world.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsMust Watch