Grounding safety

When newspapers reported several narrow shaves in the Indian skies, including a high-profile one involving UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the country's civil aviation authorities responded by issuing full-page advertisements in the newspapers giving details of just how safe India's skies were. A printed reassurance from the civil aviation authorities may have convinced many, but the investigations carried out by Indian Express show this up as a hollow claim. The Express discovered that a flying school, located in NCP chief Sharad Pawar's constituency in Baramati in Maharashtra (NCP colleague Praful Patel is the aviation minister), was faking the signatures of aviation authorities on the certificates issued to students as well as the flying logs of pilots "" to facilitate this, possibly, pilots were asked to fill in their logs in pencil. Not surprisingly then, there is a discrepancy between the number of flying hours in the records maintained by the academy and the pilots' own logs.

As happens in such cases, there is now a dispute between various members of the flying academy. One staff member blamed the chief flying instructor and said that none of the 25 pilots who were issued the fake licences had ever registered with the academy "" the suggestion being that the chief flying instructor was guilty of carrying out a side racket of his own. The chief flying instructor, in turn, has alleged he was being made a scapegoat "" indeed, the scandal was discovered after the academy's CEO accused the chief flying officer of a financial irregularity. It could be argued, as some have done, that none of this really matters since the pilots who were given these fake licences had actually passed their tests overseas and were only looking for "conversion" licences to be able to fly in India. This is weak since, at the end, the requisite number of flying hours for the conversion was not logged "" in any case, if the records were fudged for one set of pilots who actually knew how to fly, who is to say they were not done for those that did not?

The story does not end here; indeed, it is the starting point. Barely a week after the DGCA, which is in charge of the country's civil aviation safety, decided to suspend the training academy's licence to operate, the ministry of civil aviation asked it to revoke the suspension. The note of the under-secretary who signed the supersession of the DGCA order says it has the approval of the civil aviation minister, who, as already noted, is from the NCP and the flying school is located in the NCP chief's constituency. Frankly, if this is the care taken in granting licences to pilots who fly not just planes worth crores but with dozens of people on board, it is a scary thought. What is more scary is that, if the civil aviation minister can blatantly bend the rules for a flying school in his party boss's constituency, he can bend them in other cases as well. The Prime Minister has chosen all too often to play the mute spectator when his ministerial colleagues cross well-established boundaries. Surely, compromising air safety is a matter serious enough to warrant his intervention.