I remember the first time I heard about the Air India crash. The headlines screamed mechanical failure, but my gut told me that wasn’t the whole story. Now, with the preliminary report confirming the fuel supply was manually cut off mid flight, the truth is more unsettling than any technical glitch. This isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a wake up call wrapped in a scandal.

The aviation industry thrives on its carefully cultivated image of infallibility. Every crash is supposedly a one in a billion anomaly, a freak occurrence that couldn’t possibly happen again. And yet, here we are. A Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the crown jewel of modern aviation, reduced to a smoking crater because someone flipped a switch. Not a software malfunction. Not a structural flaw. A human hand.

The report describes the fuel cutoff switches being moved from RUN to CUTOFF with a one second gap between them. That’s not an accident. That’s intentional. The switches are designed to be nearly impossible to move accidentally, protected by metal bars and locking mechanisms. Yet somehow, against all odds, they were flipped. One pilot denied doing it. The other seemed just as confused. And in those few seconds of chaos, a plane fell out of the sky.

I’ve seen this movie before. The industry loves to blame pilots when things go wrong, as if humans are the weakest link in an otherwise perfect system. But this isn’t about individual error. It’s about systemic complacency. The Dreamliner is packed with enough automation to fly itself, yet the controls are still vulnerable to a single misplaced hand. That’s not progress. That’s negligence dressed up as innovation.

Let’s talk about the human cost. The passengers who boarded that flight trusted the system. They believed the safety briefings, the smiling flight attendants, the endless preflight checks. They didn’t know their lives depended on a switch behind the pilot’s seat. The lone survivor will carry that knowledge forever, along with survivor’s guilt no therapy can erase.

For the airlines, this is just another line item in the risk assessment spreadsheet. Insurance will pay out. New protocols will be drafted. The stock might dip for a week. But nothing will change. Because the real problem isn’t the switches or the pilots or even the plane. It’s the illusion of control. Aviation executives cling to this fantasy that their industry is immune to human fallibility, even as the wreckage piles up.

I don’t buy it. And neither should you. Every time we board a plane, we’re participating in a collective delusion. We pretend the safety record speaks for itself. We ignore the near misses. We shrug off the close calls. Until one day, the switches get flipped, and the delusion shatters.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Aviation safety isn’t a guarantee. It’s a gamble. Sometimes the house wins. Sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the price is measured in lives, not dollars.

The Air India crash isn’t just a failure of technology or training. It’s a failure of imagination. We built planes that can cross oceans in hours, but we still can’t engineer out the human factor. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending we can.