I fly for a living and I teach other pilots how to keep their hands and heads steady when things go wrong. From the cockpit the worst scenarios are not the ones that happen over open fields. They are the ones that happen over people. Low-level training that brings fast jets or advanced trainers over populated areas and school campuses multiplies consequences when the inevitable equipment or human failure arrives.

Bangladesh has already lost a pilot to a trainer accident in recent months when a Yak-130 crashed into the Karnaphuli river near Patenga. Rescuers recovered wreckage and one pilot died of injuries while another was treated. That accident underlines a truth every aviator learns the hard way: at low altitude you have no margin. Ejection and recovery options are limited and a mechanical failure becomes an immediate threat to people on the ground.

From an operator perspective there are three interlocking failure modes that convert a survivable training sortie into a catastrophe: unsafe mission design, poor risk controls during execution, and degraded emergency response planning on the ground. Mission design is where policy and base-level leadership must act. Training syllabi that require aggressive low-altitude handling inside or adjacent to densely populated airspace rely on a brittle mix of pilot skill and luck. When single points of failure exist in airframes or systems the inevitable moment arrives when both pilot and machine are put under stress they cannot recover from.

Execution failures are often avoidable. Single-pilot or close formation low-level practice near schools or marketplaces compresses decision time for the pilot and for air traffic control. Pilots evaluating a failing engine, control jam, or structural problem at 500 feet have seconds to choose whether to eject, steer to an empty field, or attempt a forced landing. Those seconds are the difference between a safe outcome and multiple civilian casualties. Training should mirror the realities of those seconds with realistic simulator time, strict minimum altitudes over populated areas, and mandatory instructor supervision for any practice below safe heights.

Maintenance and airworthiness culture is the other half of the equation. Advanced trainers are complex turbofan or turboprop machines with fragile margins if not scrupulously maintained. The public record in Bangladesh and elsewhere shows repeated training-jet incidents tied to mechanical problems. The remedy is not to eliminate training; it is to reduce mechanical risk by improving maintenance oversight, enforcing inspection intervals, and ensuring that any aircraft with unresolved technical squawks does not fly low over population centers.

On the ground, schools cannot be exposed without coordinated safeguards. Air bases and civil authorities should agree on permanent exclusion zones around schools and hospitals. Those exclusion zones must be published as formal restrictions in aeronautical information publications and reinforced with NOTAMs during live training. If a flight path must cross an urban area for operational reasons then flights should be restricted to safe altitudes and flown with redundant crew or chase assets capable of shepherding a stricken aircraft away from people.

Practical mitigations I would push for immediately

  • Establish permanent low-flying no-go zones around school campuses and dense residential blocks. Publish those as official restricted areas. No training sortie should plan a routine profile that descends inside those boundaries.
  • Raise minimum altitudes for solo students and early-phase trainees when operating inside a city traffic area. Transition that work to simulators until students demonstrate handling at safer altitudes.
  • Standardize mandatory risk assessments for any low-level sortie. Require command sign-off if the mission enters or overflies populated zones.
  • Harden maintenance governance. Audit back-to-back discrepancies, require cross-checks of squawk rectification, and ground any platform with unresolved flight-control or engine anomalies until cleared by a qualified board.
  • Coordinate rapid response. Preposition medical and fire crews near high-risk training corridors, run live joint exercises with local hospitals and fire services, and ensure extraction plans are tested and exercised.

The reality is blunt. Training is essential. So is protecting the public. Doing both at the same time requires honest trade-offs. If a country accepts the risk of high-performance flight training then it must accept the responsibility to fence off its population, invest in maintenance and simulators, and harden the decision chain that authorizes dangerously low work.

Bangladesh and other nations operating advanced trainers must act on these plainly foreseeable risks. Aviation safety advances when crews and regulators stop treating accidents as isolated events and start treating them as system failures. The pilot in the cockpit is usually the person making a heroic last-minute choice. Our job as operators, regulators, and citizens is to stop putting pilots in positions where there is no good choice left to make.