It has been 39 years since the Air India bombing, that grim milestone when a nation wept and a Boeing 747 became a fireball over the Atlantic. And now, this week, in a moment of exquisite bureaucratic narcissism, British aviation officials have reminded us that while Canada, India, and Ireland mourned, the United Kingdom’s safety standards ensured that no such tragedy happened here. Quite right. We are the world leaders in not having planes blown out of the sky by terrorists on our soil. Gold stars for everyone.
The commemorations, as ever, were a masterclass in hollow pageantry. Politicians read statements in monotone. Wreaths were laid. Flags flew at half-mast. And somewhere in the background, a civil servant polished a plaque commemorating the rigorousness of UK aviation protocols. After all, it was not our fault that the bomb was placed in Vancouver, nor that the luggage was transferred in London, nor that the flight was Canadian. We merely provided the terminal where the suitcase was loaded. But our safety standards? Impeccable. Unblemished. Virginal.
The logic, truth be told, is so tight you could bounce a Boeing off it. It goes something like this: Because the explosion did not happen at Heathrow, UK safety standards prevented it from happening at Heathrow. Ergo, we are good. Very good. The best. It is the kind of circular reasoning that would make a Kafka protagonist nod with grim recognition. But let us not be churlish. We have rules. We have procedures. We have a system that works, provided you define ‘works’ as ‘not being the country where the bomb detonated.’
In the spirit of such tortured triumphalism, I propose a new national holiday. Let us call it Hindsight Day. On this day, we do not remember the dead, but rather congratulate ourselves for not being the locus of their death. We will hang banners from the windows: “Thanks to UK Safety Standards, This Tragedy Didn’t Happen Here.” We will sing hymns to the Department for Transport, who, in their infinite wisdom, crafted a regime of checklists and baggage scans that, while failing to detect a bomb in a radio-cassette player, at least ensured it did not go off in a British airliner. Marvellous.
Meanwhile, the families of the 329 victims might wonder why we are patting ourselves on the back. They might suggest that the real lessons of Air India 182 lie not in the complacent safety standards of one nation, but in the global negligence that allowed a bomb to slip through the cracks. They might point out that the investigation was a shambles, that justice was glacial, that the intelligence failures were epic. But no. We are British. We had a near-miss. We learned. We fixed it. Our airports are now fortresses of security theatre. We pat you down for water bottles and make you take off your shoes, all of which would have been entirely useless against a bomb assembled in a Canadian hotel room. But it feels like we did something. That is what matters.
And so, as the wreaths wilt and the statements fade, let us raise a glass of mediocre airport gin to the unsung heroes: the British safety standards that prevented nothing but still take the credit. Because in a world of confusing, messy tragedies, we need a simple narrative. We are safe. They are not. The end.
