What Two Indian Aviation Crises Revealed About Culture

Two Indian aviation crises, and the attitudes they exposed

Character is revealed under stress. It is usually said of people. It is truer of organisations, because an organisation under load loses the ability to curate itself. The considered statement gives way to the reflex, and the reflex is the culture.

India has had two large tests recently. In December 2025 the country’s dominant carrier cancelled thousands of flights because it had not resourced itself for a fatigue rule it had two years to prepare for. Since June 2025, Air India has been managing its relationship with the families of the 260 people who died at Ahmedabad. One event was operational, one was human, and they involved different companies with different histories. The reason they belong in the same essay is that they revealed the same attitudes.

I want to set the facts of both largely aside. They have been reported adequately and, in the AI171 case, the investigation remains open and is not my subject here. What interests me is what the two episodes tell us about how Indian aviation actually thinks — not what it says at safety conferences.

Culture is a routing table

The most useful definition I know is Ron Westrum’s. He classified organisations not by their values but by what they do with inconvenient information. Pathological organisations suppress it because it threatens someone. Bureaucratic ones process it according to whether it fits an existing box. Generative ones go looking for it, because they have understood that their performance depends on knowing things they would rather not know.

This is a definition with teeth, because it is observable. You cannot audit sincerity. You can audit whether a fact travelled, how fast, to whom, and what happened to the person who sent it.

Chris Argyris put the same idea differently: every organisation has espoused values and values-in-use. The first are on the wall. The second are recoverable only by watching behaviour when the two conflict. Stress is simply the condition that makes them conflict often enough to be measurable.

So the question is never does this airline have a good safety culture. Every airline has a policy asserting that it does. The question is what happens to information that is expensive.

The first attitude: rules as tax

When a safety regulation is treated as an operating parameter, you build your establishment around it. When it is treated as a cost imposed from outside, you build your establishment around your commercial plan and then absorb the rule at the lowest price you can manage.

Those two postures produce identical paperwork. They produce entirely different airlines.

The tell is the direction of the arithmetic. A generative operator asks: given this rest requirement, what crew strength do we need, and what network does that support? A compliance-minded one asks: given the network we have already sold, what is the minimum crew strength we can defend? Both answers are documented. Only one of them holds when the winter fog arrives.

This attitude is not a failure of knowledge. Nobody in a rostering department is confused about fatigue science. It is a failure of standing — a belief, usually correct in practice, that the safety constraint is the negotiable term and the commercial commitment is the fixed one. Organisations acquire that belief empirically. They acquire it by watching which of the two has previously given way.

And they were right to believe it. That is the genuinely serious lesson of December, and it does not belong to the airline. When the regulator responded to an operator’s failure to resource for a fatigue rule by relaxing the rule, it taught the entire industry what the rule was worth. Cultural signals cascade downward with far more force than they travel up. Every planner in the country now holds a slightly different belief about what the next rule will mean.

The second attitude: the person as exposure

There is a moment in every organisation’s response to catastrophe when a human being is reclassified. A passenger becomes a claim. A family becomes a file. A grieving relative becomes a documentation workflow with a verification step.

This is not cruelty and it is rarely conscious. It happens because of what the organisation has actually resourced. Legal and finance functions are permanently staffed, trained, and rehearsed. Family assistance, in most carriers, is a binder. So when the worst day arrives, the capability that exists takes over the encounter, and the encounter takes the shape of that capability. Money moves quickly, which is genuinely to the credit of anyone who moved it. Meaning does not move at all, because nobody in the building owns it.

The families of AI171 have not, in the main, complained about the size of the payments. The recurring word in their statements is not insufficient. It is abandoned. That distinction is the whole of the cultural finding. An organisation can be materially generous and relationally absent at the same time, and the second thing is what people remember, because grief is not a liquidity problem.

The deeper attitude beneath it is the belief that harm is primarily a financial event. Once you hold that belief, everything follows logically — the dependency questionnaire, the settlement waiver, the careful phrasing about voluntary payments additional to legal liability. Each step is defensible in isolation. Together they describe an institution that has understood the accident as something that happened to its balance sheet.

The third attitude: correcting before conceding

Watch what an organisation does first when accused. Not what it eventually does. First.

The reflex to correct the record before acknowledging the harm is the single most reliable cultural indicator I know.

It is present in both of these episodes and it is present in most of the ones I have studied. It is not dishonesty. The corrections are often accurate. But sequence carries meaning that content cannot override: it announces that the organisation’s own standing is the thing under threat, and that the injured party is, for the moment, an adversary.

Reputation management is a legitimate function. It becomes pathological the instant it precedes acknowledgement rather than following it. And it is self-defeating on its own terms, because the public reads sequence fluently even when it cannot evaluate the technical claim.

The fourth attitude: gravity

Accountability has weight. Left alone, it falls.

In both episodes it landed below the level at which the decisions were actually taken — on inspectors, on frontline staff, on whoever was closest to the point of impact. This is not usually a conspiracy. It is the path of least organisational resistance: the executing layer is legible, individually identifiable, and cheap to sanction, while the deciding layer is diffuse, senior, and expensive.

The consequence is a workforce that has learned, precisely and correctly, what the cost of visibility is. And that closes the loop back to the first attitude, because an organisation that punishes downward has also quietly taught everyone below that level to stop sending information upward. The rostering analyst who could see the crew shortfall coming in September is a real person. What determined whether she spoke was not her character. It was her accurate assessment of what had happened to the last person who did.

Speak-up is not a personality trait to be encouraged with posters. It is a rational calculation about consequences, made freshly by each employee, in an industry where the number of employers is small and the memory of the market is long. Indian aviation has an inherited deference problem — of rank, of seniority, of the word sir doing structural work in a cockpit and a boardroom alike — and it will not be addressed by asking people to be braver.

What is temporary and what is not

Both organisations were mid-transformation, and transformation genuinely does produce behaviour that is not characteristic: improvised process, exhausted managers, decisions made by whoever was awake. It would be lazy to read all of it as culture.

The distinction I would draw is between improvisation and reflex. Improvisation under load is transitional and tells you little. Reflex under load — what the organisation reaches for before it has had time to think — is exactly what culture means. The events described here were not improvisations. They were consistent, repeated, internally coherent responses that each made sense given a particular view of what the organisation was protecting.

Which leaves the only question worth asking of either: has anything changed that would alter the reflex? Not the values statement. Not the apology. Culture moves when consequences move — when the safety constraint wins a visible argument against a commercial one, when the deciding layer bears the cost of its own decision, when the person who raised the inconvenient fact is promoted rather than quietly moved.

Culture is what an organisation tolerates and who it rewards. Everything else is documentation.

Stress does not build character. It audits it. What matters is not the finding — both audits have already reported — but whether anyone reads it, or files it.

The views expressed are the author’s own. Nothing here anticipates the findings of the AAIB investigation into AI171, which remains open at the time of writing.

Capt. Amit Singh, FRAeS is the founder of Safety Matters Foundation.