When transparency becomes an art of restraint
By Waldo Cerdan
Oct 2025
The interim report on the Air India flight AI171 incident was supposed to shed light on the circumstances surrounding a double engine shutdown during takeoff. Instead, it raises a series of fundamental questions about linguistic precision, methodological rigor, and the governance of truth in aviation safety.
1. One Sentence, One Doubt
It reads, almost casually: “Fuel control switches set to OFF.”
A simple technical observation, it seems. In reality, a tipping point. Because this phrase doesn’t merely describe what happened — it reveals how one chooses to tell what happened. And at that level, every word matters.
2. The Double Meaning of Switch
In aviation language, the fuel control switch is a mechanical lever that sends an electrical signal to the FADEC (Full Authority Digital Engine Control), which then commands the engine fuel shutoff valves. The pilot acts mechanically; the system interprets digitally; the servo actuators execute.
This distinction between mechanical action and electrical signal is crucial. The Flight Data Recorder (FDR) does not record a human gesture — it records a logical state of a circuit. So what does “switches set to OFF” really mean? That the levers were physically moved — by a human action? Or simply that the FDR detected an “OFF” signal on the control circuit? The report doesn’t say.
3. Two Hypotheses, Two Realities
This ambiguity isn’t semantic — it’s ontological. It determines how the event is understood.
Hypothesis 1: The levers were moved. That would imply human action — voluntary, erroneous, or reflexive. The investigation should then examine the sequence of actions, cognitive load, cockpit environment, warnings… But none of that is specified.
Hypothesis 2: The signal was read as “OFF.” That would imply a technical cause: an electrical fault, glitch, signal corruption, or power reset. A design or integration vulnerability, in other words. Again, no explanation. In both cases, the report prudently avoids saying so.
4. The Duty of Explicitation
An interim report need not deliver final conclusions — but it must clearly state where uncertainty lies.
For example, it could say:
“The available data do not yet allow determination of whether the levers were physically moved or if the OFF signal resulted from an electrical anomaly.”
That would be honest and rigorous. Not saying it, on the other hand, gives the illusion of clarity — when there is none. In safety, unspoken doubt becomes implicit falsehood.
5. The Form of the Report: Transparency as Trompe-l’œil
This ambiguity is not isolated. It fits within a broader trend among recent interim reports: providing just enough information to create an impression of transparency, but not enough to enable critical analysis.The result? A public informed about the surface of things, deprived of understanding their causes.
6. The Air France 447 Precedent
It isn’t the first time that clarity retreats before complexity. The report on flight AF447 also multiplied cautious phrases: “loss of control in flight,” “cognitive factors,” “startle effect,” “stress.” Descriptive, not explanatory.
It referred to “human factors” without questioning the philosophy of airline pilot training itself, nor acknowledging that, to this day, no program specifically teaches the cognitive foundations of cockpit performance.
In short: the symptom is circumscribed, the cause avoided. The AI171 report, so far, follows the same path — describing without confronting, observing without interpreting.
7. The Governance of Knowledge
Behind technical caution often lies political tension. Investigation boards must juggle three imperatives:
Factual truth, based on flight recorders;
Public confidence, in an industry where demand is hypersensitive to safety perception;
Industrial neutrality, vis-à-vis manufacturers and States — for whom reputational and financial stakes are immense.
But this triple constraint sometimes generates a self-referential language, where facts are filtered through an institutional grammar of restraint. No one lies — they just say less, or differently.
8. Deferred Truth
An investigation report, especially an interim one, does not hold the truth, nor claim to unveil it. But it should at least indicate where that truth remains hidden.
In the case of flight AI171, the issue is not what the report says, but what it chooses not to say. And that omission — deliberate or not — casts a shadow over the very principle of transparency on which aviation safety relies. Because at this level of gravity, silence is no longer prudence: it is a political decision about what humanity is deemed ready to know.
9. Analytical Postface
Without presuming the fundamental cause of this event, one must recognize that both hypotheses — human action or technical failure — lead to an unacceptable conclusion for any system claiming Safety first.
If human: a structural failure in pilot selection and training, hence in competency governance. If technical: a serious conceptual failure in redundancy and system design.
Either way, the issue is not confined to a person or a component. It is systemic, rooted in the way the entire ecosystem — design, regulation, training, and investigation — constructs and manages safety itself.