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‘Knowingly operating outside safety limits’: Parliament panel on India's aviation sector
It called for strengthening fatigue management for flight crew too, ensuring strict compliance with duty time limits and promoting mental health
Raising troubling questions on India's air traffic management system, a parliamentary panel on Wednesday flagged that deviance from rules has been made a regular practice. It said staff were either undertrained or overworked — be it employees that work at the regulator, or the traffic controllers, and even flight crew.
“The system is knowingly and consistently operating outside its own mandated safety limits […] through the routine use of exemptions,” its report said, as per news agencies.
It underlined a “profound and persistent shortage” of regulatory staff at Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), where half the posts are vacant; and of air traffic controllers in the field. This, the panel called “an existential threat to the integrity" of aviation safety, Reuters reported.
It called for strengthening fatigue management for flight crew too, ensuring strict compliance with duty time limits and promoting mental health awareness and support.
The timing of the report is noteworthy. It comes just over three months after 260 people died in an Air India flight crash in Ahmedabad — the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade. This committee's 36-page report tabled in Parliament was on ‘Overall Review of Safety in the Civil Aviation Sector’. The crash, specifically, is still being investigated.
On why the staffing crisis, the lawmakers' panel said it is rooted in an outdated recruitment model under which a recruitment agency hires personnel on behalf of the DGCA.
"This is a classic organizational failure, where a known and significant risk — controller fatigue — is accepted as a normal part of operations due to persistent operational and resource pressures," said the report.
The issue of the "slow and inflexible" hiring has been flagged by the civil aviation ministry too, said the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, chaired by Rajya Sabha member and JDU leader Sanjay Kumar Jha.
Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu had said in July that the government would fill up 190 of the more than 500 unfilled positions in the DGCA by October.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also stressed that India is among the fastest growing aviation markets.
Suggests new regulator to replace DGCA, use of AI
The panel has recommended a “focused” recruitment campaign and even suggested a new regulatory authority be created to replace the DGCA.
On staff and machines both, it had specific notes.
One of the recommendations is an overhaul of the Air Traffic Control (ATC) automation systems, incorporating modern AI-driven tools.
As for staff, some of the air traffic controllers were not adequately trained, the committee said. It criticised the Airports Authority of India and the DGCA for a "deeply troubling practice" of not following duty time limitations for the controllers.
This, it said, raised the risk of fatigue and increased the chances of error.
"The reliance on exemptions has created a fragile system where the safety of the entire airspace depends not on robust, systemic safeguards, but on the over-stretched cognitive endurance of a few hundred individuals," it added, as per PTI.
