As if it weren’t bad enough that an Air India flight caught fire not so long ago, and a bunch of the top pilots went on strike not so long after and a rat made itself at home on the Maharaja’s airline, now we have the crew involved in a game of fisticuffs in the aisle? Excuse me?

This illustrious timeline probably makes aviation history, for heaven’s sake. While I fully respect the beleaguered airline’s right to go ahead and dig its own grave, I do hope it doesn’t plan on taking its hapless passengers along with it.

Who cares what the crew was scuffling about. Who cares what interpersonal dramas were bubbling under the surface. Who gives a single hoot about the crew’s behavior and sense of decorum? All I can say is thank god the auto pilot held out. If one little thing had chosen to go wrong during those ten whole minutes, they’d have all made it to the next episode of Nat Geo’s Air Crash Investigation.

There are a dozen theories of what really ails Air India and who’s to blame, but what worries me is the sneaky thought that the shameful scuffle incident could just be the symptom of an overall malaise up in our not-so-safe skies. Why is it that the crew of Flight IC884 came to be so uninhibited in their expression of conflict? Are they overworked? Underfed? Under-trained? Or just plain unhappy? What prompted this ready air rage?

What I find even more alarming is how the fact that everyone has been drawn into the who-did-what first drama. Police complaints and cries for justice are all just detracting from the one question everyone should be asking: what would happen if an emergency were to happen along right then? An air accident is usually a whole chain of events, each problem spiraling into the other and a combination of factors finally resulting in disaster. Well, to me, the whole crew slugging it out while the aircraft flies itself definitely sounds like it could be one of the events in a lethal combination. If the auto pilot were to go off, like it did for another plane in long ago aviation history, the Maharaja’s chief guest, the rat, would have to do the job.