Mumbai near-miss adds to Praful's safety concerns

New Delhi: The near-miss at Mumbai airport where two aircraft narrowly avoided a collision on Sunday, along with the US threat to downgrade India’s weak aviation regulatory authority, have laid the agenda for Praful Patel as aviation minister in UPA-II. Patel, who took charge on Monday, said safety issues will top the ministry’s agenda followed by aviation infrastructure augmentation and strengthening Air India.
‘‘Growth of the sector in the past few years has brought about its own challenges. Though safety was not given the go-by in past five years, but now this, along with regulatory issues, will get highest priority,’’ Patel said. In the past five years as air traffic soared, the regulator — Directorate General of Civil Aviation — has actually seen its strength fall majorly, which meant while there were more flights to oversee, there were fewer people to do so and ensure air safety.
This failure to strengthen DGCA got frowns from international community with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) threatening to downgrade India to sub-Sahara African levels. An FAA team inspected DGCA in mid-March and enumerated 19 shortcomings to the government, with time till June to sort them out to avoid being downgraded.
In the past two months, the aviation ministry and DGCA have sorted out 18 of the 19 issues raised by FAA.
02/06/09 Times of India

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Categories: Air India - International Jun 2009, Airports Jun 2009, Jet Airways Jun 2009, NACIL Jun 2009, Safety Jun 2009