The crisis inside Air India is far from over. Sources with direct knowledge of UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) records have confirmed that British safety inspectors had flagged “systemic lapses” in the carrier’s engineering and pilot-training procedures as early as six months before the fatal crash near Mangalore. The documents, obtained by this journalist, show that the CAA’s own “heightened monitoring” list had placed Air India’s UK operations under a microscope following two separate incidents involving cockpit crew errors on London-Mumbai routes. That the airline continued to operate with minimal oversight from Indian authorities raises disturbing questions about who knew what and when.

The final crash report, now delayed for a third time, is expected to confirm that pilot fatigue and inadequate recovery training were primary factors in the accident. But the CAA leaks tell a more damning story: British officials had been pressuring Air India’s management for months to address “deficiencies in standard operating procedures” after an internal audit found that first officers were routinely left unsupervised during critical phases of flight. One confidential memo, marked “URGENT”, states: “The recurrent failure to ensure two-crew discipline is an accident waiting to happen.” That accident came on 22 May, when an Air India 737 flying from Dubai overshot the tabletop runway at Mangalore, killing 158 people.

Industry insiders say the carrier’s financial freefall has only accelerated. The airline’s debt has ballooned to over $8 billion, and its market share has slipped to 14 per cent, down from 18 per cent two years ago. The government’s repeated bailouts have done little to stem the rot, and with state-owned banks now refusing further credit, the carrier is effectively on life support. Meanwhile, a shadowy consortium of Gulf-based investors is circling, sources say, hoping to pick up the airline’s prized landing slots at Heathrow and other European hubs for a song.

The CAA’s role in this saga cannot be overstated. As the crash report’s publication kept slipping from June to August and now to October, British officials have quietly tightened the noose. They have grounded two Air India aircraft on safety grounds and demanded that the airline submit to surprise inspections. “We are not satisfied that the corrective actions have been fully implemented,” a CAA spokesperson said, refusing to elaborate. But my sources confirm that the agency is now considering whether to revoke Air India’s foreign operator permit, which would effectively ban it from UK airspace.

Why the stonewalling? The answer lies in the politics of a subcontinent. India’s civil aviation minister has been locked in a war of words with the CAA, calling the British actions “unnecessary interference”. But the documents show that the Indian regulator, the DGCA, was itself warned repeatedly about Air India’s safety culture and did nothing. One CAA briefing note explicitly states: “Indian counterparts have failed to take meaningful enforcement action.”

For the families of the Mangalore victims, justice has been painfully slow. The final crash report has been delayed by bureaucratic wrangling and corporate stonewalling. But the real story is not the report itself: it is the pattern of regulatory capture and corporate negligence that allowed a national carrier to become a hazard to its passengers. The CAA may be the only watchdog left that still barks. The question now is whether its bite will come before another disaster.

As I write this, Air India shares have lost another 3 per cent. The airline’s chairman has not been seen in public for two weeks. And in a dingy office block near Heathrow, a team of British inspectors is poring over flight logs, looking for the clue that might finally bring this house of cards down.