It is a good thing that the issue of pilots flying with forged commercial licences has come to the fore and the government is forced to sit up and take notice. But merely scrutinising the licences of over 10,000 commercial pilots, as stated by the aviation regulator, the directorate-general of civil aviation, will not stem the rot that has percolated into the system. The DGCA is the only licensing authority and there has to be a scrutiny of how this body issued licences to these pilots with fake documents.
It means someone lower down in the DGCA has been circumventing the rules. And nepotism soon follows bending of the rules. It is well known in airline circles that licences can be procured for pilots by middlemen in collusion with a section in the DGCA at a cost that ranges from `10 lakhs to `25 lakhs. The excuse that the shortage of pilots to meet the requirements of the burgeoning airline industry led to this situation does not hold water as this situation has existed for at least 10 years, if not more. The Federation of Indian Pilots had reportedly written to the DGCA over 10 years ago about the issue of substandard pilots and how only aviation professionals should examine pilots. The DGCA is reported to have written back asking for a bank of questions that could be asked! They were given a letter and CD with the type of questions that are to be asked by the examiners. Even a trust run by a corporate house that gives scholarships to pilots wanting to go abroad had brought to the attention of the DGCA the substandard quality of pilots applying for scholarships. They are also said to have brought this to the notice of the authorities at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Udyan Akademi.
Now that the DGCA is on a rescue operation and is to scrutinise the licences of 10,000 pilots, it is imperative that they get an outside audit to scrutinise the licences, otherwise it will be just another hoax on the flying public. The outside auditors will have to be subjected to a thorough orientation programme, before undertaking the audit, with, say, the Civil Aviation Authority of the UK, which is a model of civil aviation practices, or the Federal Aviation Authority of the US. The idea is to find a method whereby fraud can be detected. There is no point getting some of the four or five big consultants to do the job as they would be as clueless as the DGCA bosses. The DGCA and the government of India have to realise that it is the lives of millions of passengers that they are playing with.
The root cause of the rot is the fact that the DGCA is headed by a non-aviation professional. This has been the situation for the last several years. These non-aviation professionals are clueless about what is happening below them. The first DGCA appointed after independence was an aviation and aeronautics professional, and the last professional was Capt. H.S. Kolah. After that there have been IAS officers, generalists, heading the DGCA.
There is also no control over institutes claiming to train pilots; many don’t even have aircraft to enable pilots to rack up the necessary 50 flying hours, which is one of the conditions for getting a licence. These institutes have tie-ups with institutes in the Philippines and Malaysia where these pilots would go and get their certificates. In fact, almost all the institutes that started during the 2007-08 boom have closed down as none of their students could be recruited.