Governance

Context: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau’s preliminary report on the Air India Boeing 787 air crash in Ahmedabad was released recently. The report remains inconclusive with critical uncertainties on whether pilot action was inadvertent or deliberate. 

Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Structure of India’s Aviation System.Mains: Key Issues in India’s Aviation Safety Ecosystem.

Structure of India’s Aviation System

• The Aviation System broadly involves multiple elements:
  • Airline Operator: The Aircraft (design, airworthiness, and maintenance) and the people who operate it (maintenance engineers, technicians, pilots and cabin crew) are the responsibility of the airline operator.
  • Airports Authority of India: While Airport infrastructure, Air traffic control systems and its personnel are the responsibility of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and/or the Aerodrome operator. 
• Regulator: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)
  • DGCA regulates Airlines, Airports and Airport Authority of India (AAI).
  • It sets safety rules, approves procedures, and monitors compliance.
• Supervisory Authority: Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA)
  • It is the top-level policy-making and supervisory body for civil aviation in India.
  • It oversees both DGCA and AAI. 

Key Issues in India’s Aviation Safety Ecosystem

Each layer in aviation safety- from design, engineering, and operations to regulation- contains flaws. Accidents occur when these flaws align. Crashes are the inevitable result of years of systemic neglect and policy violations.

1. Systemic Neglect:

• Aircraft Design and Airworthiness: DGCA has limited internal technical capacity and relies heavily on foreign regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration (US) and European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EU). This weakens India's self-sufficiency in evaluating airworthiness.
• Aircraft Maintenance Standards: 
  • Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (AMEs) work under severe stress without duty time limits. Duty-time limitations recommended for AMEs by the court of inquiry following the crash in Mangaluru (2010) remain unimplemented.
  • The DGCA has allowed airlines to delegate AME tasks to less-qualified, lower-paid technicians- a cost-cutting move that undermines safety.
• Pilot and Flight Crew Stress:  
  • Airlines violate Flight Time Duty Limitations for pilots, and the DGCA grants exemptions which allow pilots who are fatigued to operate.
  • The DGCA’s unique NOC requirement restricts pilot mobility across airlines, increasing stress and enabling airlines to coerce pilots into breaching regulations.
• Airline Operations: 
  • Airlines prioritise profit over safety. Despite the DGCA suspending personnel for safety violations, airline officials often retain high positions, controlling operations.
  • DGCA-appointed officers in airlines, who are expected to enforce compliance, often have no real authority, making accountability toothless.
• Air Traffic Management: The AAI faces a severe shortage of Air Traffic Controller Officers (ATCO). The provision to give licences to ATCO has not yet been implemented. Duty-time limitations for ATCOs, recommended by the Mangalore Court of Inquiry, remain unimplemented. 
• Silencing Whistle-Blowers: Whistle-blowers are often demoted, transferred, or terminated, discouraging the reporting of critical safety issues in the AAI and airlines.

2. Regulatory Loopholes:  

• Violations of Inner Horizontal Surface (IHS) Norms
  • Thousands of illegal vertical obstructions have emerged within airport flight paths.
  • Statutory safeguards like the Aircraft Act and Order 988 of 1988 were undermined by a non-statutory appellate committee starting in 2008. This committee, comprising officials from MoCA, DGCA, and AAI, approved dozens of unsafe buildings.
  • Ironically, the same officials who approve unsafe structures are often responsible for judging safety complaints about them.
• Judiciary has been inactive on aviation issues, relying on the state’s technical expertise on the subject. 

Way Forward

• Reform DGCA and AAI to improve transparency, technical strength, and accountability.
• Enact and enforce legal protection for employees who report safety concerns.
• Revoke and re-evaluate unsafe building approvals.
• Judiciary’s conservative approach to valuing human life needs to change. It must address the deterioration in the aviation sector and hold authorities accountable. 
• A genuine ‘culture of safety’ must permeate every layer of the Aviation System including fair employment terms and access to mental health care without punitive consequences.

Without immediate, bold reforms and a fundamental shift toward a genuine culture of safety, India’s rapidly growing Aviation Sector risks further tragedies. The Judiciary, regulators, and policymakers must act in cohesion to bring out the necessary reforms.