If the "Swiss cheese" model describes an unfortunate alignment of safety holes conspiring to cause an accident, the crew in the Mangalore overrun stacked the slices and shot their own hole straight through them.
Such was the magnitude of poor planning and bad decision-making on board Air India Express flight 812 that it's hard to know where to start unravelling the mess.
Even that crude and hateful phrase "pilot error" - the blunt wastebasket diagnosis often favoured by the undiscerning media - can't begin to account for a lack of professionalism and finesse that would have undermined the safety of any approach, let alone one as taxing as that into Mangalore's table-top airport.
But with its catalogue of blatant failings, the accident underlines a broader concern in a week in which the European Commission updated its blacklist. Mangalore did not involve some barely known airline in some godforsaken corner of the world, but a rapidly growing company owned by the Indian flag carrier - whose own operation is listed in the International Air Transport Association's safety register.
In this country of burgeoning air transport development, recently under scrutiny by its own press for reported pilot licence forgeries, can we still have confidence that Mangalore is a bizarre anomaly rather than a shadowy glimpse of the direction in which Indian commercial aviation is heading? What say you, EU?
Source: Flight International
