Stop Fiddling with Human Life

The final investigation report into last year’s tragic crash of Saurya Airlines’ CRJ-200 aircraft at Tribhuvan International Airport has laid bare a chilling chain of failures—from the cockpit to the control tower and from airline boardrooms to the regulator's offices. Eighteen lives were lost and what the report reveals is not just a catalogue of human error, but an institutional collapse of responsibility, safety and accountability in Nepal’s aviation sector. It’s time to say: no more fiddling with human life. The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN), tasked with ensuring aviation safety, has failed in its primary duty. A faulty speedcard—a basic flight planning document containing incorrect takeoff speeds—had gone unchecked for years. The pilots used this flawed data to calculate V-speeds, leading to a takeoff at dangerously low speeds. Add to this a sharply excessive pitch rate of 8.6 degrees per second—far beyond safe limits—and the result was a deep stall and a catastrophic crash. The CAAN cannot shy away from its responsibility by pointing fingers on others. The very existence of such a defective document within an airline’s operations points to the absence of rigorous regulatory audits. Worse still, this same issue was never flagged in multiple routine inspections, raising questions about whether inspections are being performed diligently—or at all. The regulator’s silence despite repeated abnormal pitch incidents in the airline’s history speaks volumes.