The Union Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Praful Patel has offered to resign owning the moral responsibility for crash of the Dubai-Mangalore flight, Boeing 737-800 of the Air India on Saturday which overshot the runway at Mangalore airport, plunged into a ravine and burst into flames, claiming 158 lives.

It would be wrong to draw a parallel between the resignation of Lal Bahadur Shastri as the railway minister in early sixties following an accident and Mr Patel’s latest offer. Morality is no more the defining element in politics.
The reason for the crash could only be ascertained once the authorities analyse the black box, which incidentally has been retrieved from the ravine. But post-crash what has surfaced points to lack of effective control on Air India operations. While Mr Patel  finds no technical fault with the aircraft or crew, the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) blamed pilot fatigue. Air India has been running in loss for more than six years. This had an adverse impact on the crew. ICPA says pilots are made to work beyond their normal duty. Yet, would that alone explain the pilot taking an incorrect flight path and missing the touchdown point? Is there substance in the view that Indian pilots would not let such misses happen because they would be more familiar than the foreign pilots airlines are hiring?
Z Glusica was a competent pilot, there was no visibility problem, then in this background how to explain that he overshot the runway by not less than 300 metres? The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has undertaken the inquiry into the crash but by the time the report will come the people would have forgotten the mishap. Some time back, the DGCA under its draft rule “financial surveillance from safety perspective” had suggested to the Union government that “in view of adverse financial conditions of airlines, it has become necessary to take appropriate action to ensure a higher level of safety in aircraft operations. There is a need to carry out ‘evaluation of air carrier’s management of significant changes’ to identify airlines in distress either due to financial issues or operational issues so as to ensure that safety oversight functions are not affected.”  But the ministry did not take the report seriously. The Mangalore air-crash has proved that much more needs to be done to strengthen air safety norms in the Indian air space.   Last month, the DGCA had revealed that it was investigating 15 near-miss incidents in which planes flew dangerously close to each other and several cases in which pilots reported drunk for duty.