With
airline passenger traffic recording record highs
in India and new airlines opening by the week to
accommodate an expanding flying public now
estimated at 150 million, airlines are scrambling
to recruit, hire and train enough pilots to keep
planes in the air and maintain reasonable safety
standards and profit margins.
Civil
Aviation Minister Praful Patel informed parliament
in a speech on July 27 on the extent of the
problem and the steps the government is taking to
deal with it. Measures include increasing the
retirement age of pilots from 60 to 65, setting up
more flight-training schools, and involving more
foreign pilots in training and in flying
commercial aircraft.
A bemused Jitendra
Bhargava, director of public relations for Air
India and an industry veteran of more than 25
years, told Asia
Times
Online, "There is a global shortage of pilots,
including in China, and our expansion plans have
been affected. [At present], Air India has around
40 foreign nationals as cockpit captains."
A senior captain with Jet Airways, who
requested anonymity because of contractual
clauses, informed ATol how employing foreign
pilots not only has increased operational costs
but also has caused communication problems and
near-mishaps. Indian pilots' salaries are cracking
the ceiling, with average monthly pay scales
equivalent to about US$7,500, but even that is far
less than what their foreign colleagues are
pocketing.
"With foreign pilots being paid
about $20,000 per month, there is no such thing as
a low-cost airline," the senior Jet Airways pilot
said. He proceeded to list the nationalities of
foreign pilots currently flying with Jet:
"Romanian, Croatian, English, German, Austrian,
Swiss, Swedish, Hungarian, [Argentine], Mexican,
Brazilian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino,
Australian ..."
The Directorate General of
Civil Aviation (DGCA), the industry regulator,
allows foreign pilots to be hired for not more
than a 12-week stretch. Technically, they are in
the cockpit to train Indian pilots.
A
bigger worry is that the directorate is permitting
private airlines to employ pilots inexperienced
with sensitive fly-by-wire aircraft. This includes
fighter pilots poached from the Indian Air Force.
The problem, point out technical analysts, is that
it takes more than 250 hours of flying experience
to get familiar with the Electronic Flight
Instrument Systems that modern passenger planes
have.
The Chennai-based, non-profit Air
Passengers Association of India (APAI) is worried
that the present civil-aviation boom is more than
the DGCA resources can handle, particularly in
granting safety audits of airlines. It wants a
civil-aviation regulatory independent of the
directorate. APAI president D Sudhakara Reddy
said, "We demand creation of a Civil Aviation
Regulatory Authority along the lines of the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to tackle
issues concerning passenger safety."
India
currently has 19 flying clubs and training
institutes licensed by the DGCA. The government
plans to establish more flying institutes,
including the proposed Rajiv Gandhi National
Flying Training Institute at Gondia, Maharashtra
state.
But the problem with civil aviation
in India is not so much the lack of flying
institutes as the difficulty in getting a pilot's
license. It is easier to get a license in the
United States than in India. Moreover, the DGCA
issues licenses under rules drafted in 1937, and
the examinations contain many questions irrelevant
to modern flying conditions.
This summer
some airlines announced that they plan to train
their own pilots partially at their expense. Air
India, with 550 pilots already on staff, plans to
recruit about 200 science and engineering
graduates with almost no flying experience and
turn them into pilots, according to Bhargava. They
could do with better training. Early last month,
an Air India Airbus A310 gave Bahrain's airport a
fright when it landed on the wrong runway.
The US has 25,000 aircraft to serve a
flying population of 213 million; India has about
150 aircraft to serve a flying market of 150
million. India needs at least another 10,000
aircraft and a minimum of 100,000 pilots at the
current regulatory minimum of 10 pilots per
aircraft for domestic flights and 22 per aircraft
for international flights. "The problem is so big
you can't wrap your fingers around it," said one
pilot.
Estimates say that 4,000 more
captains will be needed to feed airline expansion
plans up to 2010. A trainee takes at least 200
flying hours and one year to become a co-pilot. A
co-pilot takes about four years to become a
captain.
Little wonder that foreign
training institutes too are trying to get in the
act. Canada-based CAE, serving about 3,500
aviation clients worldwide, launched a global
flight training alliance - initially with Academia
Aeron Utica de Vora in Spain, HM Aerospace in
Langkawi, Malaysia, and International Airline
Training Academy in Tucson, Arizona - to produce
more than 2,000 pilots a year. This is to address
the growing shortage of airline crews,
particularly in rapidly growing aviation markets
such as China and India.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
