The Director General of Civil Aviation on June 20 issued directives to the Air India management to relieve three top-level executives who oversee the management of the duty hours of pilots. According to the DGCA, those tasked with overseeing licensing requirements of the flight crew, their rest hours and making sure that only those pilots who have the necessary experience of having recently operated an aircraft safely and legally are rostered for those planes.
According to the DGCA directive, Air India not only failed to ensure that requirements were being met but also that no action was taken internally against those who failed to ensure that the norms were being followed. The air safety regulator also warned the national carrier that if it does not mend its ways and the violations are repeated, the carrier would stand to lose its licence.
While the DGCA's action is welcome and points to a tightening of norms for carriers across the country, the real question that needs to be asked is: “What was the DGCA doing all this while, and why has it woken up only after a fatal crash that cost nearly 300 lives?” If Air India is at fault for failing to ensure compliance, the DGCA is at fault too for allowing the lapses to continue without any penal action.
It is a well-known fact, that in a chain of command and responsibility, it is not just those in the airline who are responsible who need to be held accountable, if there are lapses that led to the mishap, it also means that the regulator has failed in its duty.
According to several experts who have weighed in on the Air India crash, the DGCA rather than being a professional body and regulator of the Indian airline scene, functions more like a bureaucratic body -- and not without reason. In its makeup, it is staffed more with bureaucrats and less with professionals from the flying industry and air traffic controllers. Such a situation, where those with actual experience in flying are pushed to the sidelines and those with experience in processing files are given priority only points to the sad state of affairs concerning the regulation of Indian aviation.
The DGCA’s action is typical of how the Indian bureaucracy and government respond to any tragedy. After the tragedy has happened, they go about knocking heads off and announcing corrective actions, safety checks and the like. But never are these systems and enforcement mechanisms regularly enforced, rather they often succumb to political interference asking for favours, relaxation in favour of certain individuals, waivers of fines and bribes to get the regulator to look the other way.
Inevitably this leads to tragedies, accidents and other mass casualty events be it in the form of road accidents due to people driving the wrong way, falling bridges that claim countless lives of innocent tourists, stampedes or the latest case of the Air India crash, the government of the day wakes up only after lives have been lost and the authorities want to show to the public that they are taking action to ensure that the situation does not repeat.
Safety starts with taking care of the small everyday things and not acting only when something major goes wrong.
