Flying rats and other air scares cloud India’s aviation industry

New Delhi: Pilots on an Air India flight from Mumbai to Saudi Arabia last August had an unexpected visitor in the cockpit: a rat.
The rodent crawled over the first officer’s leg and disappeared into the plane’s avionics bay. The aircraft arrived safely and was later fumigated.
Two months earlier, during a Pawan Hans helicopter flight in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, a door opened at 2,000 feet and a cabin attendant was sucked out and killed.
Also last summer, a SpiceJet flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad lost contact with air traffic controllers for 10 minutes after it flew through precipitation. And an AirAsia services officer was killed after her arm was severed in a bizarre accident on the ramp leading to a plane.
How common are such safety mishaps? That’s not for the public to know, says an official with India’s airline regulator.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation in New Delhi has been destroying detailed safety records and, in many cases, keeping only a short description of serious inflight and on-ground security and safety incidents.
The directorate, which oversees India’s surging but recently troubled aviation sector, admits that safety records “prior to the year 2010 have been destroyed.” Bir Singh Rai, an official with the government regulator, made the declaration in a letter last month in response to a Right to Information Act request filed by the Star.
Following his written response to the Star’s information request, Rai specified that only paper records had been destroyed, and that electronic records were still being maintained by the directorate general.
But a review of 17 weeks’ worth of safety records revealed that the directorate general is keeping merely snippets of information about serious safety incidents in weekly incident reports.
Rai initially approved the Star’s request to review safety incident reports in person. He subsequently changed his mind and demanded the Star leave the building, saying documents relating to airline safety in India are secret.
09/07/11 Rick Westhead/Suhasini Raj/The Star.com

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Categories: Safety Jul 2011