Air India evaded mandatory cockpit training for pilots

Mumbai: Air India Ltd did not provide mandatory cockpit training to most of its international flight crew for over two years, violating regulatory norms and which could have potentially led to the Air India Express crash in 2010, according to an internal email. The inquiry into the flight IX-812 crash in Mangalore, on May 2010 which killed 158 people, pointed to poor crew resource management (CRM) as a key reason for the worst crash India had seen in a decade.
CRM training for pilots is primarily meant to improve air safety and focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership and decision making. It was started in 1979 internationally after it was found that most aviation accidents occurred because of human error. In India, CRM training is to be done for all pilots every year, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), according to a Mint report by Tarun Shukla.
“The court of inquiry into the Mangalore accident has published its report, wherein inadequate CRM has played a significant role,” AS Soman, Executive Director of Operations and Customer Service, Air India, wrote in a June 3, 2011 email to then airline chairman Arvind Jadhav. “A comparison of the tables in the report forwarded herewith clearly indicates that practically no CRM training was conducted in the operations department between 2007 and 2010.”
The court of inquiry report directly attributes the crash to poor CRM and a lack of “assertive training” for the first officer of flight IX-812, who did not challenge any of the errors made by the commanding pilot. “...the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) recordings reveal low standards of CRM by both pilots... The pilots were not working in harmony...” the email said, quoting the crash report.
05/03/12 TravelBizMonitor

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Categories: Air India Mar 2012, Safety Mar 2012