Abstract
On August 7, 2020, Air India Express Flight AXB 1344 overran the tabletop runway at Kozhikode, killing 21 of the 190 people on board. The accident echoed the 2010 Mangalore disaster, occurring under strikingly identical circumstances. This case examines why organisations fail to learn from catastrophic failures. The cockpit is the starting point, not the explanation: a first officer who identified the danger, made the correct call, had the procedural authority to act, yet did not act. Behind that moment lay a hollowed-out safety management system, unaddressed training deficiencies, regulatory inaction and a culture of compliance-as-performance. Drawing on Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model, Edmondson’s framework of psychological safety and Argyris and Schön’s distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning, the case poses a central question: When did the crash actually begin?
Additional Information
| Product Type | Case |
|---|---|
| Reference No. | OB0253 (B) |
| Title | Go around': AXB1344's Final Landing 2020 (B) |
| Pages | 3 |
| Published on | Jul 1, 2026 |
| Year of Event | 2020-21 |
| Authors | Sharma,Vipin Kumar; Gupta,Vishal; Reddy, G Venkat Ram; Tanwar, Monika; ; |
| Area | Organizational Behaviour (OB) |
| Discipline | Organizational Behaviour |
| Sector | Government, Transportation and Logistics |
| Learning Objective | - Apply Reason's Swiss Cheese Model to trace how latent organisational and regulatory conditions created the trajectory toward catastrophe in Flight AXB 1344. - Analyse the distinction between voice and agency in high-stakes teams, and evaluate how psychological safety shapes whether formal authority to speak up translates into decisive action. -Diagnose the gap between single-loop and double-loop learning by examining why safety recommendations from the 2010 Mangalore accident were documented as implemented yet produced no genuine behavioural or cultural change at Air India Express. - Design interventions that address root causes of safety culture failure, moving beyond compliance-driven, surface-level corrective actions toward a transformative organisational change. |
| Keywords | Psychological Safety, Culture, Organisational Learning, Accident Causation |
| Country | India |
| State | Kerala |
| City | Kozhikode |
| Courses | MBA (PGP), MBA-PGPX |
| Access | For All |
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