Historically weak, copter safety faces bleak future too

New Delhi: Another high-profile personality, in this case Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu, is killed in a helicopter crash. While this may be old news by this morning, alarmingly, concerns about helicopter travel safety in the country aren’t news either.
If in 2005, the DC Kaushik Committee report on helicopter operations in the country strongly highlighted the inadequacy of flight inspectors (only one for almost 150 choppers then), even today civil aviation director general EK Bharat Bhushan admits the helicopter segment has “historically” been the weaker part of the sector (there have been 60 civil chopper crashes in the country in the past two decades).
Interestingly, things haven’t improved much since 2005, with the country having only four flight safety inspectors for an estimated fleet of 270 civil choppers in the country and 130 non-scheduled flight operators.
Worse, these four are ‘part-time’ inspectors who divide their time between inspection and flying duties as chopper pilots themselves.
How shoddy the framework is can be gauged by the fact that of these four, three are pilots with PSU Pawan Hans Helicopters Ltd (PHHL), and have been appointed by PHHL itself. The fourth is a pilot with a private operator. Clearly, aviation expert captain Hanfee is not wrong when he calls for an “adequate number of neutral, full-time inspectors.”
05/05/11 Vishakha Talreja/Sukalp Sharma/Financial Express

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Categories: Safety May 2011