India, July 14 -- The tragic crash of Air India Express Flight IX171 near Ahmedabad, which took the lives of all onboard, including two pilots, has stirred not only grief but also the beginnings of a disturbing investigative narrative - one where inference, not evidence, begins to shape public perception. The preliminary report has suggested that both engines lost thrust after takeoff, possibly due to manual activation of fuel control cutoff switches in the cockpit. A tense and cryptic cockpit voice recording quotes Captain Sumeet Sabharwal asking, "Why did you cut off the fuel?," to which first officer Clive Kunder replies, "I did not do so". This fragment, stripped of context or clarity, has already led to speculative commentary about "cockpit confusion". But this is not just speculation - it is posthumous attribution of fault without full due process, a dangerous tendency that has repeated itself too often in India's civil aviation crash history. Captain Sabharwal had logged over 15,000 flight hours, with 8,596 hours on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. First officer Kunder had over 3,400 hours, including 1,128 on the same aircraft type. They were rested, medically cleared and experienced in this route. To insinuate negligence or error without conclusive findings not only offends the doctrine of natural justice but also violates the core legal principle that no one shall be condemned unheard. These men are no longer alive to defend their decisions, refute technical interpretations, or correct misrepresentations. They are being tried in absentia, without representation and without the right of rebuttal - all characteristics of what legal scholars term procedural impropriety. Meanwhile, the fuel control switches in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner are meant to be protected by triple operation positive-lock mechanisms, making accidental activation highly improbable. If they can be toggled inadvertently during a routine climb, it raises profound questions of cockpit design failure and human-factor engineering flaws. Aircraft control systems - particularly those governing engine shutdown - cannot and must not be susceptible to what is commonly known as "fat finger errors". These are not mobile phone keys. They are life-critical mechanisms and must meet the highest standards of physical isolation, tactile differentiation, and activation resistance. It is further argued that the switch was in fact manually operated. But even if so, was it clearly labelled, physically guarded, recessed, or isolated as per best practices in aviation human-machine interface design? If not, then the failure may lie in design ergonomics or standard operating procedure clarity, not individual fault. This brings us to an uncomfortable but necessary institutional critique. In India, air crash investigations have too often followed a template of blaming the pilot, especially when the pilot is dead. From Mangalore (2010) to Kozhikode (2020) to Patna (2000), the pattern has been consistent: Spotlight cockpit actions, downplay infrastructure failures, procedural deficiencies, or equipment defects. The living corporate entities - aircraft manufacturers, regulatory bodies, or airline management - emerge with reputations intact, if not entirely exonerated. One must ask: Is this justice, or is it institutional risk management masquerading as inquiry? It is argued, often with technical formality, that an inquiry must start from the cockpit because pilots have the final authority over the aircraft. That may be true under operational control doctrines, but legal causation must be established based on comprehensive chain-of-failure analysis, not narrow endpoint responsibility. Another common defence is that manufacturer protocols were FAA-certified. But certification is not infallibility. Even Boeing's 737 MAX, certified and flying, was grounded globally after systemic software and sensor flaws became known - sadly, after 346 lives were lost. Certification is not a moral indemnity; it is merely a regulatory threshold that does not displace real-world accountability. The Air India pilots' associations have rightly protested the premature media narrative that has emerged. Their concern is not sentimental - it is constitutional. Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the right to life, liberty and dignity, is not extinguished by death. A deceased person's dignity, reputation, and professional legacy remain protected under evolving principles of posthumous legal personality - a subject recognised increasingly in comparative jurisprudence. I plead for the dead. We must not allow vicarious exoneration of corporate giants through implied culpability of the unrepresented dead. We must not convert inquiry into indictment or allow investigation by narrative to replace evidence-based causation. And we must not repeat, yet again, the judicial sin of treating silence as guilt. If cockpit error is to be proven, let it be so proven - with full evidentiary rigour, not investigative speculation. Until then, let the default position be a presumption of hard-core professionalism, not a presumption of fault. In the courtroom of truth, the dead must not be the soft targets simply because they are the quietest. The defence of deceased pilots lies with people listening to the loud calls of their conscience. After their untimely termination of lives, our silence would be the second grave injustice they do not deserve....