India, Dec. 11 -- Last week's IndiGo meltdown didn't just leave passengers stranded or pile luggage six feet high at multiple airports- it exposed the uncomfortable truth that India's aviation ecosystem is running on structural weaknesses everyone has ignored for years.

Weather didn't break the system; the system broke itself. Brittle regulation, understaffed operations, uneven oversight, and razor-thin buffers created a crisis that should never have happened in a nation aspiring to be Viksit Bharat.

What unfolded was not an exception. It was the most visible example of a global pattern: modern aviation is a complex, tightly wound machine that collapses instantly when even one cog fails.

We have designed a quiz around this fiasco that ...