Judgment At 30,000 Feet: Legal Reckoning And Accountability Frameworks In Aviation Catastrophes Under Indian And International Law
- IJLLR Journal
- Jun 30
- 1 min read
Devyansh Arora, Amity Law School
ABSTRACT
When a plane crashes, the tragedy goes far beyond the lives lost. It sets off a ripple of legal, regulatory, and institutional questions: Who is responsible? What failed—human judgment, machine, or system? And how does the law respond to something that fell from the sky, yet left accountability grounded?
Aviation law straddles multiple zones of liability—criminal, civil, and administrative—and in India, this responsibility is shaped by the Aircraft Act, 1934, the Aircraft Rules, 1937, and now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which replaces the Indian Penal Code. These laws define negligence, endangerment, and corporate fault in aviation contexts. Alongside them, authorities like the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) carry out deep, technical investigations—retrieving black box data, decoding cockpit voice recordings, and issuing findings that become the backbone of court proceedings. Globally, the legal landscape is influenced by conventions like the Chicago Convention (1944), which governs international civil aviation, and the Montreal Convention (1999), which sets the rules for compensation and liability in global air travel. Though designed for cooperation, these frameworks often collide when tragedy unfolds across borders.
To understand how the law reacts in practice, the paper looks at major aviation tragedies: the Air India Express Calicut crash in 2020, Air France Flight 447 in 2009, Malaysia Airlines MH370 in 2014, and most recently, the Air India Flight AI171 crash in Ahmedabad in June 2025.
