The mangled fuselage of Air India flight AI 128 lay crumpled on the tarmac for 14 hours before investigators began removing the dead. That delay tells you everything about the structural failures that compound aviation disasters. The crash, which occurred during final approach in heavy monsoon rain at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport on Tuesday evening, killed 158 of the 186 on board. But for the survivors and families of the deceased, the trauma has barely begun.
As a climate correspondent, I do not normally cover aviation accidents. But the physics of psychological injury follows the same immutable rules as thermodynamics: energy does not disappear. It merely transforms. In this case, the kinetic energy of a Boeing 777 meeting the ground at 180 kilometres per hour has transformed into a wave of grief, anger, and fractured trust that is now propagating through Indian society at the speed of social media.
The immediate failures are not subtle. Survivors report being left on the runway for over two hours in the rain without shelter or medical triage. One passenger, Priya Sharma, described watching rescue workers attend to the wreckage instead of the living. ‘We were sitting on the grass, bleeding, and nobody came. We had to wave our arms to be seen,’ she told reporters. The airport’s disaster management plan, designed for fire containment and evacuation, had no dedicated mental health protocol.
This is a systems failure. Aviation safety is built on redundancy: twin engines, dual hydraulic systems, backup navigation. But the psychological safety net has no backup. The airline’s family assistance team did not arrive at the airport until nine hours after the crash. Meanwhile, relatives gathered at the terminal’s arrival gate, watching the departure board continue to list connecting flights. ‘We don’t look at the sky anymore,’ said Sanjay Mehta, whose wife was among the deceased. ‘Not after this.’
The gap in victim care is not unique to Air India. In 2019, a report by the International Air Transport Association found that only 30% of airlines had full-time crisis management teams trained in psychological first aid. The rest rely on chaplains or hotel staff. For survivors, the acute stress reaction can evolve into post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or complex grief. Without immediate intervention, the neural pathways of trauma become cemented.
There are models worth replicating. After the 2013 Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco, the airline activated a family care team within two hours, providing dedicated liaisons for each family. The team included mental health professionals who used a technique called ‘psychological triage’ to assess immediate needs. Compare that to Mumbai, where families spent the night in a conference room with no information and no privacy.
The Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation has announced a formal inquiry, but that will take months. What is needed now is a protocol for the next 72 hours: trained grief counsellors at every major airport, a family assistance centre separate from the media and administrative areas, and a clear communication chain that does not rely on airline staff to deliver death notifications.
I say this not as an aviation expert but as someone who studies how systems fail. Climate change has taught us that disasters are not random; they are the predictable outcomes of ignored vulnerabilities. The cracks in victim care are a form of infrastructure neglect. When a plane falls from the sky, the least we can do is catch the people left behind.
The monsoon has cleared over Mumbai today, but the survivors look at the blue sky and see no safety. That is not a metaphor. It is a cortical injury that will take years to heal. Airlines and regulators would do well to remember: trauma does not evaporate. It compounds.
