Most ‘heartbreaking’ crisis of my career, use it as an act of force to build a ‘safer airline’: Air India Chairman

Tata Sons and Air India Chairman N Chandrasekaran on Monday urged Air India employees to stay on course in the wake of the airline’s plane crash in Ahmedabad last week, terming the accident the most “heartbreaking" crisis of his career, according to sources.

Addressing close to 700 employees and the leadership team across the Air India headquarters and Air India Training Academy in Gurugram, Chandrasekaran said the employees need to show resilience and use this incident as an act of force to build a “safer airline".

“We have to make sure that we stay the course. Be more determined in everything we do. We need to wait for the investigation to find out," sources quoted Chandrasekaran as saying.

“I’ve seen a reasonable number of crises in my career, but this is the most heartbreaking one which I never thought I would see," Chandrasekaran said, as per sources.

Over 270 people were killed on June 12 when a London-bound Air India plane — a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner — carrying 242 passengers and crew crashed into a medical college complex in Ahmedabad less than a minute after takeoff.

The aircraft took off at 1.39 pm and within seconds, after reaching a height of about 650 feet, it started sinking. At 1.39 pm, the pilot informed Ahmedabad ATC that it was a May Day, a code word used for full emergency.

When the ATC tried to contact Air India aircraft, it did not receive any response. Exactly one minute later, the plane crashed in Meghaninagar, about 2 km from the airport, Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha had informed during a media briefing on Sunday.

According to him, the aircraft started losing its height after reaching 650 feet.

Air Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which comes under the Civil Aviation Ministry, is probing the accident.

On Sunday, Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu announced the setting up of a panel to investigate the causes of the accident.

According to sources, at the Air India headquarters, Chandrasekaran visited the emergency command centre; the integrated operations command centre and the customer service and support.

“Whatever I say and whatever we do is not going to bring the lives back. Those affected, they’re going to feel the pain for a very long time. But having said that, we have got to do our very best humanly possible to help each of them," he said in his address to the employees.

Stating that the airline is getting more determined after the crash, he said, “It’s not the time to talk about what we will do, but I want to say that we will consider all the people who lost someone as our family forever."

Urging the employees to be “strong", he said, “We need to show resilience. We need to use this incident as an act of force to build a safer airline."

“So we have to make sure that we stay the course. Be more determined in everything we do. We need to wait for the investigation to find out (the cause)," the Tata Sons chief said.

Chandrasekaran said that (aviation) business is a very complex one and the aircraft (itself) is a complex machine, “so (there are) a lot of redundancies, checks and balances, certifications, which have been perfected over years and years. Yet this happens, so we will figure out why it happens after the investigation."

He said that everyone’s job at Air India is to get the airline “into a better place, the place it deserves, the place this country deserves, the place where all the people who have trust in us deserve".

India