Air India Crash A Hundred Wrongs Later

Seconds after television channels beamed footage of the air India express flight that crashed after landing in Mangalore, killing 158 passengers, a seasoned aviation expert called his friends in the directorate General of civil aviation (dGca) and hollered: “Had you listened to me, this crash could have been averted.”
Chennai-based a ranganathan was referring to a 2006 audit by the International civil aviation organisation (Icao) in which he and others had sifted through reams of documents and pinpointed hundreds of safety violations. The violations had taken place due to substandard qualifying norms and training of air technical personnel. Yet, no one in the DGCA or its parent body, the Ministry of civil aviation, took notice of the report that identified the crisis zones in the rapidly growing aviation industry. Worse, national Geographic channel, which had shown interest in producing programmes on those zones was politely told to back off.
“Very few in India understand air safety, which is totally distinct from air security,” Ranganathan told Tehelka in a telephonic interview. He should know. for although India’s last major crash occurred nearly a decade ago in 2000, there has been a steady rise in the number of near mid-air collisions. Three were reported just last year from Mumbai airport, while five people were killed in delhi in 2008 by airport vehicles on the tarmac. as for smaller violations, those are not even taken cognisance of by the DGCA and the airport authority of India (AAI).
“An alert India could have averted this disaster,” argues Kapil Kaul, a top aviation expert who heads the delhi-based centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, hinting at inadequately trained inspectors for the airlines. But the million-dollar question is: who will bell the cat? The Mangalore crash is India’s worst since 1996, when a mid-air collision between two passenger planes in Charkhi-Dadri, 125 km from Delhi, killed 349 people. There was a time when delhi had just three inspectors for 10 commercial airlines and 600 planes — well below the global requirement. Though their numbers have gone up since, most of the new entrants are inadequately trained. Moreover, lapsed inspections since 2005 have created a backlog that may take years to clear.
Much the same is true of the pilots, most of whom are poorly trained. Meanwhile, there has been a five-fold increase in the passenger load. Many airlines that hired foreign pilots (some 600) are now being told to replace them with Indians, but nobody in the government has paused to consider the logistics. How long will it take to find efficient replacements? nobody has the answer to that.
29/05/10 Shantanu Guha Ray/Tehelka.com

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Categories: Air India Budget May 2010, Airports May 2010, NACIL May 2010, Safety May 2010