In the wake of Air India’s Boeing 787 Dreamliner disaster in Ahmedabad, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has ordered three key Air India employees responsible for scheduling crews to resign due to “systematic and gross violations of pilot working hours rules.”
The DGCA announced that it has uncovered instances where Air India’s pilots worked overtime, crews were formed without proper licenses, and rest between shifts was simply ignored. All of this, according to the regulator, is not isolated incidents, but the result of a complete lack of control and internal discipline.
The inspection was not random. It began after the tragedy of June 12 – the crash of an Air India Dreamliner near Ahmedabad. Following the incident, the DGCA decided to tighten supervision of compliance with safety standards in all major airlines in the country.
Air India has been ordered to fix all the problems immediately. The carrier has 7-10 days to provide the DGCA with a full report on the results of the unscheduled inspection. And this is just the beginning: the inspectors said that if the findings are unsatisfactory, the company will face sanctions.
“The violations found not only threaten the health of the pilots but also the safety of passengers. We can no longer turn a blind eye to this,” the DGCA said in a statement.
The DGCA’s decision is a signal to the entire Indian civil aviation sector: negligence and violation of rules will not go unpunished, and that a new stage of reforming India’s civil aviation begins now.
