On July 21, a Bangladesh Air Force FT-7 BGI training jet crashed directly into Milestone School and College in Uttara. At least 31 people were killed, most of them children. Over 170 others were injured, many with severe burns. A teacher lost her life trying to evacuate her students. The flight lieutenant who was the pilot died after trying to veer away from housing.
This was not a warzone. It was a school. And it has now become the site of one of Dhaka’s most significant traumas.
Just a week earlier, I had warned about this kind of disaster in my previous article, citing the Air India crash in Ahmedabad and the unsafe flight paths over Dhaka. That warning is no longer hypothetical. It arrived, not from the skies of India, but from our own.
In Dhaka, where the Kurmitola Air Base is situated adjacent to the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport (HSIA), the skies are shared but uncoordinated; every takeoff carries the potential for disaster for the millions below.
While this was not a civilian flight, that distinction means little in the lived geography of Dhaka. Both Kurmitola Air Base and HSIA operate in the same densely populated airspace, surrounded by schools, mosques, residential towers, and bustling markets.
They share the same congested skies, constrained by the same visual obstructions and urban buildup. A technical failure, military or civilian, within the first few minutes of takeoff leaves no safe emergency landing zone. Only rooftops and lives lie below.
This crash has forever altered the lives of families who trusted that a school was a safe place for their children. It has left a scar on a city already burdened by unplanned growth and infrastructural fatigue.
If the Air India crash in Ahmedabad was a warning, then Uttara was our reckoning. We must no longer treat aviation risk as an abstract policy debate; it is now a matter of lives and lasting consequences.
The simple truth is this: An aircraft, whether military or commercial, should not be flying over a school campus in the heart of the capital. No child should die from the sky collapsing onto their classroom.
The skies over Dhaka cannot wait for another disaster. Bangladesh must launch an immediate civil-military aviation safety initiative, including:
- A unified airspace risk commission comprising the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Air Force
- Immediate safety audits of all schools, hospitals, and residential areas located under active flight paths
- Establishment of no-fly and no-build buffer zones above and beneath critical flight corridors
- Urgent safety audits of all schools, hospitals, and high-density zones under current flight paths
- Public disclosure of Dhaka’s air corridor risk maps for transparency and accountability
While the July 21 crash involved a military jet, the truth is that Dhaka’s entire airspace is overstressed. The Kurmitola Air Base, HSIA, and adjacent zones, such as Uttara, Banani, and Mirpur, form a dangerous bottleneck for vertical traffic.
Shahjalal International Airport, already landlocked, cannot safely expand or absorb future aviation demands. Nor can Kurmitola continue to conduct training flights over schools and homes. The solution is not only technical, but also geographic.
Relocation planning must begin now. I outlined before the potential peri-urban zones, extending from the Madhupur Tract to the Ganakbari–Saturia belt, that can house a future-ready airport and new military aviation zones, far from dense civilian life.
We must also revisit the question I posed earlier: Is Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the right place? The answer remains a clear no, just as it does for the continued operation of the Kurmitola Air Base within Dhaka’s densely populated core.
Whether civilian or military, these facilities now occupy airspace that is too crowded, poorly coordinated, and too dangerous for the millions of people living directly beneath their flight paths.
We now have an opportunity born of grief but shaped by responsibility, not just to reimagine how Bangladesh flies, but where it flies. The skies over Dhaka can no longer bear the weight of both military and civilian aviation crisscrossing dense residential airspace.
A future-ready system must include relocated airbases, deconflicted flight paths, and unified oversight of our national airspace. Through a modern civilian airport and a restructured military aviation strategy, we must prioritize safety over inertia. Let this moment of mourning become a blueprint for resilience, sovereignty, and compassion.
But that vision must begin with the most brutal truth: The status quo is not safe. As a nation, we now stand at a forked sky, one path leading to normalized risk and future tragedies, the other toward strategic safety and lasting reform.
The choice is ours, and it must be made now. To truly honour the children, the teacher, the pilot, and all others who were killed, severely injured, or are now fighting for their lives, we must act now with policy, with planning, and with the courage to reclaim the skies above us.
Shaikh Afnan Birahim is a writer and analyst. He is a Postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow.