Is It Safe To Fly? We Must Trust Stats As Air India Crash Report Rekindles Question

As I write this and you are reading it, there could be anywhere between 10,000 and 16,000 aircraft in the air world over, ferrying people, cargo or military equipment, or maybe training pilots to do all of this.

On July 7, 2023, FlightRadar, the flight tracking service, said that the day before was the busiest day for commercial aviation with some 1,34,386 commercial flights being tracked that day. “More than 20,000 flights are in the air right now,” said FlightRadar.

Just in the US, on any given day, there could be some 45,000 flights with 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

There are, as per travel data platform OAG, some 706 airlines operating worldwide and around 3,891 airports in operation, which help connect the many routes we fly on, either non-stop or with halts and stops.

The top country pairs by seats are Spain to the United Kingdom, Mexico and the US, Canada and the US, Germany and Spain and Germany and Turkey.

India and the United Arab Emirates are at number 10 in terms of the number of aircraft and passengers flying to and fro.

The bottom line is that many aircraft fly daily, including Boeing 787s, which, according to Boeing, as of April this year, total around 1,175 aircraft operating approximately 2,100 flights each day.

All of this is obviously in the context of the preliminary report of the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau on Air India’s B787-8 aircraft that crashed in Ahmedabad a month ago on June 12, 2025.

The question it raises is whether it is safe for us to take commercial flights.

Unanswered Questions

The critical part of this report is this.

Within moments of the plane lifting off from Ahmedabad airport, both engines of the aircraft were moved to CUTOFF with a 1-second gap. The engines spooled down, and the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) deployed automatically.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder records one pilot asking, “Why did you cut off?” The other says he did not.

Ten seconds later, the switches were returned to the RUN position, but it was too late. Jet engines require time to relight and spool up. Enough videos are circulating that show the aircraft's position as it lost power.

There are two kinds of situations, one involving a switch problem, which experts acknowledge as a possibility but also say is less probable because of the type of switches and the effort it takes to put them in cutoff mode.

Pilots I have interacted with say it is next to impossible to hit these switches accidentally with an elbow, for example, particularly at the takeoff stage when all eyes are usually on other parameters in the cockpit.

And even if there was a problem with the switches, it is more likely that the problem would have been spotted earlier, before takeoff.

The second is that for reasons not known or clear at this point, the pilot or pilots deliberately switched off the engines.

From what I could see in the aviator groups, many pilots and experts are veering towards this theory at this point, given the available information.

This is obviously entering a zone of speculation and conjecture that is unfortunate, treacherous and has huge ramifications.

So while we may have a technical understanding of what caused the crash, there remain crucial and unanswered questions.

But there are two important takeaways, but before I come to that.

Air India has obviously much work to do to improve morale, particularly among its flying crew, but that is a subject for another article.

And this preliminary report should also have been released earlier. No one expected it to come out in 24 hours, but it has taken longer than it should have from all accounts.

The lack of information creates a needless vacuum into which all kinds of conspiracy theories pour in, increasing anxiety levels for both aviation industry professionals as well as passengers.

Believe The Statistics

Now, the two important takeaways.

Significantly, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) report does not recommend any action to Boeing B787/8 aircraft and GE GEnx-1B engine operators and manufacturers.

While the investigation is ongoing and will be for maybe a year in all, this does mean that there was nothing found at this stage to suggest an automatic engine failure and more importantly, something wrong with the equipment or aircraft in question.

That is obviously a matter of relief for aviation industry people and passengers alike, at least at this point.

The second comes back to statistics. The last six months have been tough for global aviation, particularly involving commercial airliners.

Last December, a Jeju Air flight overran a runway in South Korea at high speed after a bird strike and slammed into a berm, killing all 175 passengers and four crew members. Two crew members survived.

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a Black Hawk military helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington DC.

All 64 people on the plane and the three helicopter crew died. And then last month, Air India Flight 171 crashed after takeoff.

Devastating as they are, it has been pointed out that there is nothing that links these tragedies as such.

Conde Nast Traveller earlier this year quoted Arnold Barnett, professor of statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, saying, “The death risk per passenger boarding is about 1 in 100 million… If you see a little kid at a US airport, he or she is five times as likely to grow up to be president of the US as to perish on the forthcoming flight.”