Three things need to be flagged after the incident involving Air India flight AI2379, an Airbus A320neo from Phuket to New Delhi, on August 4, which lost its flight controls after multiple hydraulic system failures and suddenly dropped 300 feet. Immediately after the incident, Air India tried to dismiss it as "turbulence", implying it was an act of God and ruling out any system malfunction. But the Ministry of Civil Aviation called it a sudden loss of altitude and classified it as a serious incident. A preliminary engineering assessment of the decoded flight data reveals that the aircraft experienced three hydraulic system failures within seconds of each other. The analysis said elevators and aileron surfaces were lost for around 4 seconds. Elevators control pitch, the nose moving up and down, while ailerons control roll, the banking of the wings.
Secondly, and more importantly, Air India's problem did not begin on August 4; it has been guilty of several incidents earlier. Between January 2025 and February 2026, the regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, inspected 166 Air India aircraft. It found repeated technical defects on 137 of them. The regulator had already served the airline with a notice for allowing the same faults to recur across consecutive flights while crews were dispatched anyway. In May last year, a spot check found that a Bengaluru-London flight had exceeded the 10-hour flight time limit on two consecutive days. Days before the Ahmedabad crash in June last year, which killed 260 people, it had warned the airline was flying Airbus aircraft with expired or unverified emergency equipment—one A319 more than three months overdue—and that Air India had failed to respond in time to deficiencies already raised.
In July 2025, the DGCA issued four notices covering 29 violations, including 19 training lapses, and recorded that systemic problems in compliance monitoring, crew planning, and training governance remained unresolved despite repeated warnings. In December 2025, it issued a notice asking the airline to explain why a Dreamliner had been dispatched on the Delhi-Tokyo route when the same faults had recurred across five previous sectors and the crew flew it anyway.
…and then there is the issue of one of the two pilots, who, according to reports, was not at the controls when the incident happened and failed a confirmatory test for marijuana. The airline acted swiftly and has now ordered drug tests for more than 5,000 pilots.
Third, when the AI2379 landed in New Delhi two hours after the injuries, no ground arrangements were in place, no ambulance was waiting to take the injured to the hospital, and no senior staff were present. Thirteen passengers and four crew had been hurt. These three issues show that an airline that has been repeatedly warned yet keeps flying is now no longer the failure of one company; it is the failure of everyone overseeing it.
