In a scandal that would make Lady Macbeth blush and a bureaucrat squirm, it has emerged that the victims of the Air India crash have been, to put it bluntly, overlooked. Yes, you heard that right. Overlooked. As if they were a footnote in a tedious Whitehall report or an inconvenient stain on a pristine carpet. The British aviation safety review, which was supposed to be the guardian angel of the skies, has been caught with its trousers down, demanding a review of itself. It's a farce so grand it could fill the Royal Albert Hall twice over.
Let's set the scene. A plane falls from the sky. People die. It's tragic, yes, but also messy. Death, after all, is the ultimate inconvenience for those who have to file the paperwork. And what do we get from the hallowed halls of aviation safety? A review. Because nothing says 'we care' quite like a committee of people in suits sipping tea and moving paper from one pile to another.
Now, I'm not one to point fingers, but when the very bodies charged with ensuring our aerial safety are found to be more interested in their own performance than in the souls they've failed, it's time to get angry. And I am angry. Angrier than a wasp trapped in a jar. This is a failure of monumental proportions, a dereliction of duty that would have had a Victorian nanny reaching for the cane.
But let's not be too harsh. After all, these are the same people who manage to spend millions on a feasibility study for a new airport while the existing ones crumble like stale biscuits. They are the masters of the 'review.' A review is a beautiful thing, you see. It gives the illusion of action without any of the pesky consequences. It's the perfect bureaucratic pacifier.
What we need, what we demand, is action. Not a review. Action. We need to know why the victims were forgotten. Was it incompetence? Was it malice? Or was it simply the natural result of a system that has become so bloated with its own self-importance that it can no longer see the people it's meant to protect?
I'll tell you what I think. I think it's a cocktail of all three, shaken not stirred, with a dash of British complacency. The kind that says, 'It'll be alright, old boy, we've got a review.' Well, it's not alright. It's not alright for the families who are still waiting for answers. It's not alright for the pilots who have to fly in a system rife with neglect. And it's certainly not alright for the gin-drinking, truth-seeking satirist who has to report on such nonsense.
So, to the aviation safety review board, I say this: stop reviewing and start doing. Get your hands dirty. Feel the weight of the tragedy. And for heaven's sake, remember the victims. They are not a checklist. They are not a statistic. They are the reason you exist. If you've forgotten that, then you've forgotten everything.
In the meantime, I'll be here, pouring myself another gin and tonic, watching the circus from my typewriter. The show must go on, after all. And what a show it is.
