Aviation's Accountability Gap

It has taken a pilot testing positive for marijuana, rather than any of the near-catastrophes that preceded it, to finally jolt India's aviation establishment into proactive mode. On 4 August, Air India flight AI2379, en route from Phuket to Delhi, plunged roughly 300 feet mid-cruise. The pilot-in-command subsequently tested positive for cannabis in both an initial and a confirmatory test. After much delay, Air India announced group-wide psychoactive substance screening for all pilots, and the DGCA is now said to be drafting amendments to make such testing mandatory across the industry. This is welcome.

Contrast this with what preceded it. In June 2025, an Air India Boeing 787 crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people, after investigators found that both engines' fuel-control switches had moved from "run" to "cutoff" within a second of each other. The preliminary report identified the probable mechanism but offered no explanation for how or why it happened, leaving the door open to competing theories, including the possibility of human error. A tragedy of that scale should have triggered an unambiguous, urgent, system-wide response. Instead, the investigation drifted into a familiar pattern: preliminary findings, competing narratives, pilot bodies defending their own, and, over a year on, no conclusive determination and no visible corrective action that the flying public can point to with confidence.

This is the pattern that should worry us more than any single incident. India's commercial aviation sector has, in recent memory, recorded a troubling run of serious occurrences - technical snags, altitude excursions, near-misses - few of which have concluded in a clear, publicly stated cause, and fewer still in demonstrable remedial action. Each time, the machinery of inquiry grinds slowly, ambiguity sets in, and the story fades from the news cycle until the next one arrives. Had AI2379 ended in disaster rather than a scare, it is entirely plausible that this episode too would have joined the queue of unresolved cases, its cause debated rather than established, its lessons unlearnt.

The remedy now is straightforward, and there is no reason for delay. Psychoactive-substance testing should be mandatory; a positive result should trigger automatic grounding and enforcement under existing rules. Investigations owe passengers a conclusion, not merely a preliminary report followed by silence. Aviation safety is not a matter for eventual consensus. It is a matter of drawing the line before the next flight, not after it.