The temptation to settle on a convenient explanation after a major aviation disaster is understandable. Families seek closure, the public demands answers and the media races to fill the information vacuum. Yet air crash investigations are designed to resist precisely this impulse. Their purpose is not to satisfy immediate curiosity but to establish, through evidence, why a catastrophe occurred and how a similar tragedy can be prevented.

The investigation into the Air India Boeing 787 crash near Ahmedabad appears to be following that principle. Far from narrowing its inquiry to a single event inside the cockpit, investigators have examined aircraft systems, maintenance records, crew training, medical history, organisational culture and human factors. The inclusion of psychological assessment underlines an important reality: modern aviation accidents are rarely the result of one isolated mistake.

More often, they arise from an interaction of technical failures, operational decisions, institutional practices and human behaviour. This broader approach matters because commercial aviation is built on the concept of layered safety. Aircraft are designed with multiple redundancies precisely to ensure that one failure........

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