The announcement of a UK aviation safety review into victim identification protocols sounds, on the surface, like a dry procedural matter. A bureaucratic response to a bureaucratic failure. But to those of us who watch the human cost of these systems, it is a story of how people can be erased twice: first by the crash, then by the process that is meant to bring them home.
For weeks, the families of Air India crash survivors have been in limbo, not knowing if their loved ones are alive or dead. They have been told that the identification process is 'ongoing', that DNA samples are being cross-referenced, that the British team is working around the clock. But for the families, the clock has stopped. They live in a permanent present tense, a state of arrested grief.
The review, launched by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, is focusing on how the UK handles international aviation disasters. It will look at how bodies and survivors are matched to identities, how data is shared across borders, and how families are communicated with. But the real question is: why did it take a public outcry to get here?
Those of us who cover social trends know that technology has given us an unspoken promise: that nothing will be lost. There are algorithms for everything. There is a database for every fingerprint. And yet, in the chaos of a crash, the human element is the first to be forgotten. The registers become paperwork. The survivors become case numbers. The families become statistics.
This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of imagination. The protocols were written for a world that does not exist: a world where information flows cleanly, where every body has a record, where every survivor has a voice. But disasters are messy. They are full of strangers without documents, languages without translators, and trauma that confuses memory. The people designing these systems have never sat with a mother who does not know if her son is in a hospital bed or a morgue drawer.
What this review must address is the cultural shift we need: from identification as a technical process to identification as a human one. That means having teams of social workers at every stage, not just forensic experts. It means setting up a single point of contact for each family, so they do not have to retell their story to a dozen officials. It means acknowledging that the waiting is a form of punishment.
The Air India crash is a tragedy of multiple layers. But the indifference to the living is a scandal we can fix. The survivors and the families of the dead deserve more than a review. They deserve to be remembered. And that starts with knowing who they are.
