21 June,2026 08:10 AM IST | Mumbai | Nishant Sahdev
According to the investigation one pilot asked the other a question. “Why did you cut it off?” The pilot’s reply was simple. “I did not.” These three words have become a big deal. Pic/Nimesh Dave
The BJ Medical College canteen in Ahmedabad is back in business now! Students are sitting at the tables again. If you came to campus today without knowing its history it would be difficult to imagine that a year ago this was one of the photographed places in India.
On June 12, 2025 the Air India Flight AI-171 crashed seconds after takeoff. The crash tore through the college complex. Killed passengers, crew and people on the ground.
For days everyone in the country watched in horror. It was headline everywhere! A year later the physical scars have mostly gone away. The debris is all cleared up. The damaged buildings have been fixed. Classes started up again a time ago. Life just keeps moving like it always does. What has not moved forward with certainty is our understanding of what actually happened.
This is probably the thing about disasters that happen with modern technology. It is often easier to fix the damage than to figure out what went wrong in our minds. When the plane crashed the people investigating got a lot of evidence to look at. They had the boxes, the recordings from the cockpit, data recorders, sensor logs and the satellites data.
Modern planes make an amount of information that we can use. Even with all that information a lot of people are still not satisfied. This is not because the investigators are not doing their job. It is not because we are missing some evidence. It is because technology has become so complicated that it is hard to understand what went wrong.
For a time when planes crashed people would look for one main reason.
Maybe a part was faulty or someone made a mistake when they were fixing the plane. Maybe the pilot did something. Maybe the weather was bad. Modern planes are different. They are not just machines. They are like worlds, with a lot of things working together.
A Boeing 787 is a network of computers, sensors and software systems all working together. When something goes wrong the challenge is not just finding out what failed. The challenge is understanding how many systems affected each other in a few seconds. That is why one particular conversation from the cockpit is getting a lot of attention.
According to the investigation one pilot asked the other a question. "Why did you cut it off?" The pilot's reply was simple. "I did not." These three words have become a big deal. The issue is not whether the machine is right or wrong. The issue is that it's difficult to see how one thing causes another.
We live in a world where humans and machines can see things differently. This tension is everywhere.
It's not about aviation. It's about how we interact with machines. Boeing 787 is a system. Boeing 787 has systems. These systems interact with each other. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways. The question of whether this dynamic was a factor in AI-171 is something that investigators need to figure out. The evidence needs to be looked at on its own.
We should pay attention to the bigger issue because it is becoming a major problem of our time. We are creating systems that are so complex that no one person can fully understand them. For example, no single engineer knows every line of code in a modern airplane.
No one person fully understands the system that supports modern communications around the world. No single expert can explain everything that happens inside the most advanced artificial intelligence systems today. Knowledge is not limited by one person, it is spread out. One team knows about sensors. Another team knows about software. Another team knows about maintenance. Another team knows about operations. The system works because thousands of specialists contribute their knowledge.
The problem is that when something goes wrong it is tough to figure out who is responsible and what happened. When everything is working the complexity of the system is not noticeable. When something fails it becomes a big deal. Air travel has always been an achievement of engineering. Every time a flight's successful it shows just how precise and careful the engineering is. Millions of people arrive at their destinations safely because all the different systems are working exactly as they should.
We should not forget about these successes. We should also learn from mistakes. Making things more complex is not, without cost. Every time we add a layer of automation, software and technology that is connected to other things we create new ways for things to go wrong that we might not be able to predict or understand.
One year after AI-171 I am not really thinking about who's to blame. I want to know how we look into what went wrong with technology in our world.
We are living in a time when we really like to collect information about everything. We measure things, we record things, we store things. Having all this information does not mean we really understand what is going on. Sometimes the difficult part is not getting the information. It is figuring out what it means.
The place where AI-171 crashed has been fixed up. The campus is back to normal. People are not talking about it in the news anymore. We still have a lot of questions. Not, about what happened to Flight AI-171. About the kind of world we are creating. A world that is going to be managed by systems that are really powerful, really automatic and really complicated. The people who were hurt by AI-171 deserve to know what happened. They deserve to be told the truth. They deserve an investigation that will follow the facts wherever they lead. Most of all they deserve a society that's willing to learn from mistakes rather than just forgetting about them. Because the real test of how bad a disaster is, is not how quickly we clean up the mess.
It is whether we understand what happened so we can stop it from happening.
One year later we still have a lot of work to do.
Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States. He makes sense of the AI era in your favourite Sunday mid-day.
