The dream’s not buried but Tatas must wake up
AI 171 crash should make airline listen much more to employees’ concerns over operational issues. The group has the ability to restore AI’s reputation
Oct 8, 2021 | ‘Tatas will have the opportunity of regaining the image and reputation it (Air India) enjoyed in earlier years. JRD Tata would have been overjoyed…’ – Ratan Tata’s tweet on winning the bid to acquire AI along with AI Express.
June 13, 2025 | ‘In shock and mourning…for so many deaths to occur at once is incomprehensible…one of the darkest days in Tata Group’s history’. Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran said a day after the AI 171 crash.
Air India’s first wide-body crash of AI 171 since Jan 1978, when it lost Boeing 747 ‘Emperor Ashoka’ in Mumbai, is the biggest setback to the airline’s multi-billion-dollar turnaround programme that the Tatas, both founder and new owner, embarked upon after taking over the PSU about three and a half years ago. An AI jumbo jet ‘Emperor Kanishka’ had exploded mid-air in June 1985 over the Atlantic Ocean but that was an act of terror.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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