IndiaOne Air

Is IndiaOne Air safe?

IndiaOne Air had a fatal accident in January 2026, less than four years after it started flying, and we score it 62. The risk on any one flight is still low in absolute terms, but the record is short and the fleet tiny: two or three nine-seat Cessna Grand Caravans, and one of them crashed near Rourkela after its engine lost oil pressure. The investigation is not finished, and the airline has no confirmed IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit.

The airline flies short hops from Bhubaneswar to smaller towns in Odisha, among them Rourkela, Utkela near Bhawanipatna and Jeypore, with a link from Jeypore to Visakhapatnam. Most of these routes are under the government's UDAN regional scheme, which subsidises seats to towns that larger airlines do not serve. It was the first scheduled airline in India to fly single-engine aircraft, and received its air operator certificate on 24 June 2022.

The Rourkela crash in January 2026

On 10 January 2026, Caravan VT-KSS took off from Bhubaneswar for Rourkela as flight I7 102, with two pilots and four passengers. According to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau's (AAIB) preliminary report, the crew noticed falling engine oil pressure about 30 nautical miles short of Rourkela, then a loss of power. They shut the engine down under the checklist, called a mayday, and looked for a place to land. A dry riverbed was out of reach at their height, so they picked an open field near the village of Jalda. On final approach the aircraft clipped a treetop and a high-tension power line and hit the ground.

The nose gear broke off and the forward fuselage broke apart; there was no fire. Both pilots and three passengers were seriously injured. One passenger later died of injuries. The weather was clear, with 7 kilometres of visibility.

The preliminary report does not give a cause. The AAIB has the cockpit voice and flight data recordings and the engine, and investigators from the US NTSB and Canada's TSB are taking part, as the aircraft and engine makers' home states. What made the oil pressure drop is the question that matters for passengers: a maintenance error would say more about the airline than a fault in the engine itself. We will update this page when the final report comes out.

This counts fully in our accident factor. One fatal accident in the last 15 years puts an airline between 60 and 79, and with so few flights IndiaOne Air sits near the bottom of that range. By our rough estimate from its schedules, at most 14 flights a day and fewer in its early years, it has flown fewer than 20,000 flights in total, so one fatal accident is a high rate.

Two pilots, new aircraft, one engine

The airline's case for itself is the equipment. Its Caravans were bought new from 2022 (VT-KSS was built in June that year) with Garmin G1000 NXi avionics, satellite-based approach capability and a combined cockpit voice and flight data recorder, which it says no other Indian operator of this class carries. It also flies with two pilots, a captain and a first officer, where many Caravan operators around the world use one.

None of that changes the basic fact of a single-engine aircraft. If the engine stops, the aircraft has to land wherever it can glide to. The preliminary report says the crew at Rourkela followed the checklist, and everyone on board survived the impact itself, but the outcome depended on the ground below. Over the forested hills on the way to Jeypore, open fields are scarce.

IndiaOne Air publishes no fleet list. Before the crash it had three Caravans; we found no report of a replacement for VT-KSS. In November 2025 it signed a letter of intent with De Havilland Canada for up to ten Twin Otter 300-G aircraft, a twin-engine type, but no firm order or delivery date has been announced.

A thin incident record

India's AAIB has published no serious-incident report on an IndiaOne Air flight. The one other event we found is from 20 July 2025: after landing at Jamshedpur from Kolkata with seven passengers, the captain noticed a technical problem and shut the aircraft down on the turn pad. The airline said it was inspected and found serviceable.

That clean-looking record says less than it seems. The DGCA's 2025 audit figures covered eight scheduled airlines, from Alliance Air to IndiGo, but not IndiaOne Air, so there is no public count of findings against it. India holds FAA Category 1FAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary, and no Indian airline is on the EU Air Safety ListEU Air Safety ListThe European Commission's list of airlines banned or restricted from flying in EU airspace because they do not meet international safety standards.More in the glossary.

Small airports, cyclones and monsoon

IndiaOne Air's airports are among the smallest with scheduled flights in India. Utkela is a state-owned airstrip in Kalahandi district, and the AAIB describes Rourkela, run by the state steel company, as a VFR airport. From June to September the monsoon brings heavy rain and low cloud over Odisha, and cyclones from the Bay of Bengal hit the coast in spring and autumn. Expect weather cancellations on a network with so few aircraft.

Flying IndiaOne Air

• Weigh the alternative. On many of these routes the choice is the flight or a long road or rail journey, which carries its own risk. If an Alliance Air or IndiGo flight serves your town at a workable time, it is the safer statistical choice.
• Listen to the briefing and know your exit. In a cabin of nine seats, the crew's briefing is personal. Know how the door opens; after a forced landing, getting out fast matters.
• Fly in the morning in the monsoon. Monsoon storms often build in the afternoon, and a forced landing in good visibility gives the crew far more options.

How we scored it

The 2026 crash keeps the accident factor (61) low in its band, and the single-engine fleet (60) offsets the new aircraft and good equipment. Oversight (67) is the Indian level without a confirmed IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit, and incidents (64) reflect a record too thin to prove much. For India's other regional airlines, see Alliance Air, Star Air and Fly91.