In June 2025, tragedy struck again: Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people, including 19 on the ground. Among the 242 passengers and crew on board, there was only one survivor—Vishwashkumar Ramesh. Many British citizens and one Portuguese were among the dead.
According to early U.S. assessments, cockpit voice recordings suggest the captain may have shut off the fuel supply moments after takeoff, prompting the first officer to panic. If confirmed, this devastating act echoes a hauntingly similar tragedy from a decade earlier.
In 2015, German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed a Germanwings plane into the French Alps, killing 149 passengers and himself. Investigations revealed he had been under psychiatric care and taking medication for depression. I wrote about it then, shortly after being the target of psychological warfare in the workplace. What I saw in Lubitz's story, I recognized in those around me: people suffering from deep emotional wounds, misdiagnosed and misunderstood by a society that fears real feeling more than death itself.
“Going to see a psychiatric doctor was his biggest mistake,” I wrote at the time. “What he needed was a true enlightened witness to help him see and understand the real roots of his depression and despair.”
Instead, like so many others, he was numbed. Sedated. Told to adjust to a world that had crushed his inner child. And that child—still carrying the pain of unmet needs and unresolved trauma—finally erupted in an irreversible way.
Alice Miller once said of another tragedy:
“The Virginia Tech story is a flight from the own history with the help of drugs. They only help to flee and not to see.”
That sentence has stayed with me for years.
We may never know exactly what drove the Air India pilot to make such a fateful decision, but we must begin to see these tragedies not as isolated incidents, but as symptoms of a much deeper societal illness. Unresolved childhood trauma, when compounded by present-day stress and isolation, becomes a volatile force. And in a profession like aviation—where stoicism is prized and vulnerability is taboo—there is rarely space to process emotional pain.
Medication, accolades, and professional success cannot fill the void of unmet childhood needs. If anything, they reinforce the emotional prison. The truth is: unacknowledged pain doesn’t disappear—it festers, it reenacts, it destroys.
We need a culture where authentic emotional awareness is not feared or pathologized, but recognized as a path to healing and prevention. Not only for those who suffer, but for everyone who unknowingly shares their flight.
Until that happens, more lives will be lost—not only in the skies, but in homes, workplaces, schools, and quiet corners of society where the screams of the inner child remain unheard.
Sylvie
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