The crash of the Learjet carrying Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar near Baramati is not merely a tragic accident; it is a moment that forces uncomfortable questions about aviation safety, regulatory judgment, and the risks normalised in India’s fast-growing non-scheduled aviation sector. The final minutes of the flight—poor visibility, an aborted landing, a clearance to land without a read-back, and flames visible seconds later—read like a checklist of vulnerabilities converging at once. While investigations by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau must be allowed to run their course, the facts already in the public domain underline a deeper concern: that India’s aviation safety framework still struggles at the margins, where smaller airfields, private operators, and high-pressure decision-making intersect.
At the centre of the episode lies Baramati’s status as an uncontrolled airfield, a category that exists legally but uneasily in an era of sophisticated jets, tight schedules, and political VIP movements. Uncontrolled does not mean unregulated, yet it often translates into limited infrastructure, absence of instrument landing systems, and reliance on visual meteorological conditions even when visibility deteriorates. Globally, aviation safety has evolved by reducing the scope for discretion in poor weather, not expanding it. The idea that a modern business jet could be attempting a landing in marginal visibility at an airfield without precision approach aids reflects a structural mismatch between aircraft capability and airport readiness. When such mismatches are compounded by time pressure and human judgment, risk multiplies silently.
The issue of communication breakdown is equally troubling. Aviation safety is built on redundancy—procedures designed to catch human error before it becomes fatal. The read-back protocol exists precisely to ensure that instructions are not just issued but received, understood, and acknowledged. When a landing clearance receives no confirmation, alarms should go off immediately in any cockpit or control environment. That moments later, the aircraft was seen engulfed in flames raises questions that go beyond individual error and enter the realm of systemic safeguards. Was the crew overwhelmed? Did cockpit workload spike after the go-around? Were there distractions, misjudgements, or failures in situational awareness? These are not accusations but necessary lines of inquiry, because aviation accidents are rarely the result of a single lapse.
India’s non-scheduled aviation sector has expanded rapidly over the past decade, fuelled by corporate travel, political movements, and private charter demand. This growth has brought efficiency and convenience, but it has also stretched oversight mechanisms. While regulatory audits may show compliance on paper, safety is not merely about certificates of airworthiness or the absence of level-I findings. It is about operational culture—how crews are trained to make conservative decisions, how operators balance commercial or political expectations with safety margins, and how regulators ensure that smaller airports are not pushed beyond their safe operating envelope. International accident data consistently show that business aviation faces higher relative risk during approach and landing phases, particularly at non-towered or minimally equipped airfields. India is not immune to these patterns, and pretending otherwise would be reckless.
There is also a broader policy lesson embedded in this tragedy. India’s aviation growth story has rightly focused on expanding regional connectivity, building new airports, and democratising air travel. Yet safety infrastructure has not always kept pace with ambition. Visual approaches, limited weather reporting, and inadequate ground systems may suffice for training aircraft or light operations, but they are increasingly inadequate for high-performance jets carrying senior leaders. The temptation to “make do” because something is legally permissible must be resisted. Aviation safety globally has advanced not by exploiting regulatory grey zones, but by steadily shrinking them. Every major crash investigation eventually points to decisions that were technically allowed but operationally unwise.
As the AAIB investigates the Baramati crash, the focus should not narrow prematurely to pilot actions alone. Accountability in aviation is shared across systems—airport design, regulatory thresholds, operator culture, training standards, and real-time decision support. The loss of five lives, including a senior elected leader, is a reminder that safety failures do not discriminate by status. If anything, they expose how even those at the highest levels remain vulnerable to gaps in governance. The true tribute to those lost will not be procedural condolences, but a serious re-examination of how India manages risk in the expanding grey zone between commercial airlines and private aviation. Aviation safety is unforgiving of complacency, and the cost of learning lessons after tragedy is always higher than the cost of preventing it.