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The summary sacking of E.K. Bharat Bhushan, the director general, civil aviation, whose extension had only recently been accorded by the cabinet committee on appointments and who, by all accounts, was making every effort to set the Directorate General Civil Aviation house in some order, raises disturbing questions about a regulatory authority primarily responsible for aviation safety and the professional conduct of civil aviation in the country.
To the travelling public this has revived memories of Air India Express Flight 812 overshooting the runway at Mangalore on May 22, 2010 and extinguishing 158 precious lives making it the third worst air disaster in India. This was followed barely four days later by another aircraft of Air India Express en route to Pune from Dubai reportedly encountering an uncontrolled rapid descent from cruising altitude while the captain had left the cockpit for the restroom. The young pilot later told the DGCA that he “got into a panic situation” and the DGCA report itself lamely concluded that “the incident occurred due to inadvertent handling of the control column in fully automated mode by the copilot, which got compounded as he was not trained to recover the aircraft in automated mode”. What, one wondered, were co-pilots trained to do if they could not even pull out of a simple dive?
The answer to this question naturally followed in March of last year when 14 pilots had to be grounded after it came to light that a non-existent pilot training school in Rajasthan was doling out fake documents based on which pilots had obtained flying licences. At the time some eight touts were also arrested, and since touts work in a two-way environment, at least nine middle and senior-level staffers in the DGCA were also put under the scanner. And if this were not disconcerting enough, it emerged that a DGCA director of air safety, R.S. Passi, was stripped of his responsibilities for influencing an airline to employ his daughter who had failed her flying test. So much for the culture of safety within the walls of the national aviation safety promoter and regulator.
At the time, Bhushan had stated that commercial pilots licences of around 10,000 pilots and airline transport pilots licences of 4,000 pilots would also be screened along with a third-party audit of 40 flying schools. It is no secret that many flying schools are owned by influential people with the right contacts, and commerce, not professional flight training, is their first priority. Now that we know that Bhushan was not welcome in his efforts at cleaning up the internal mess, one wonders whether these efforts were also stunted, leading to the inevitable question: how many more ill-trained pilots are occupying cockpits in Indian skies?
From reports it would appear that the day before he was sacked, Bhushan had prepared a note regarding the large amounts that Kingfisher Airlines owed to its creditors and employees. The note was to be a warning to KFA to remedy this state of affairs, failing which its operations would be suspended. This was in keeping with a DGCA policy of financial surveillance of all airlines to keep an eye on any unfavourable trends like significant layoffs, delays in meeting payrolls, inadequate maintenance of aircraft, shortage of supplies and spare parts and curtailment of flights, and to determine if they had in place remedial systems.
The logic of such guidelines is impeccable as in this business every activity, howsoever remote it may appear to be, is ultimately linked to the end product of safe flight. Whilst credit for introducing this policy must go to the then head of DGCA, Syed Nasim Ahmad Zaidi, who is currently secretary, civil aviation, one fails to understand why subsequent actions of the ministry are in contravention of this spirit. To begin with, the existence of the note that reportedly caused Bhushan’s axing was denied by Prashant Sukul, a joint secretary in the ministry of civil aviation who had taken over temporary charge from Bhushan and who has since handed it over to a new DGCA. In response, Bhushan had brought to Sukul’s notice that the removal of such a note which contained observations of two other officers and his own ruling suggested wrongdoing of a very serious nature and needed investigating.
We have the word of an erstwhile head of DGCA, who had gained a reputation for cleaning up the system and, no doubt, was removed for this sin, against that of a stand-in DGCA and present joint secretary in the ministry of civil aviation who would have been party to the former’s unceremonial sacking. No bets on where the truth lies, but if the ministry is genuinely concerned about the health of civil aviation and wants to convey this message to the aviation community and the weary Indian air traveller, it owes it to them to share what was the fire that necessitated Bhushan’s instant dismissal and what happened to the note that he left behind? Silence continues to be construed as the sway of vested interests over the independent working of the safety regulator, fuelled perhaps by crony capitalism in its naked avatar, with the lives of unsuspecting and innocent passengers as pawns.
Instead, a canard is now being spread that it is not the DGCA’s remit to call on private airlines to pay salaries and dues, which are not linked to safety. The ministry has gone as far as to say in a statement that “there are no regulatory frameworks anywhere in the world allowing cancellation of the licence of airlines merely for failing to pay salaries to the staff”. Whilst this statement may technically be correct, it is grossly misleading and a half-truth, and certainly in contradiction to the policy of financial surveillance of airlines that is currently in force within DGCA.
Considering that it was the current civil aviation secretary who had introduced the system of financial surveillance in the DGCA in the first place, it is hard to believe that he personally endorses the statement issued by his own ministry. The case only gets curiouser when one reads reports that the only other airline having difficulty in passing through DGCA’s financial surveillance was Air India under the control of the civil aviation ministry and headed by yet another civil servant. Did the mandarins in the ministry feel that once Bhushan targeted the Kingfisher Airlines, the next could well be Air India or was it some extraneous influence that intervened to get Bhushan unceremoniously sacked?
If by now the potential air traveller is running scared, he has every reason to do so, because the entire civil aviation scene is ridden with issues of conflict of interest and cronyism. We have heads of the DGCA who are erstwhile civil servants in the civil aviation ministry and vice versa. The ministry controls both the regulator DGCA and Air India, and yet the regulator is expected to audit Air India impartially as it does other private operators. In a sector that is highly competitive and technologically driven, we continue to appoint civil servants as heads of Air India, in spite of the fact that the Air India of Tata’s pedigree and performance has been run aground by them. Even as the DGCA is the overall safety regulator, it alone investigates accidents and for obvious reasons will not ever find fault with itself.
The co-founder of one of the Indian carriers, which, reportedly and without fanfare, is one of the few running profitably, was constrained to publicly lament, “Our principle issue was why the government is tinkering with policies for a select few in the industry.” This certainly is a question that the entire corporate world should be asking, because one does not know where selectivity will strike next.
The director general of the International Air Transport Association recently warned of India’s aviation being faced with a multi-faceted crisis, adding that the global aviation community was concerned over the situation in India. Since the IATA is a global trade organization representing some 240 airlines (including Air India) and accords safety as its number one priority, this observation cannot be viewed lightly. And if all this was not bad enough, it has just been reported that the International Civil Aviation Organization is going to do a safety audit of the DGCA to examine if it is effective enough to ensure safe flying in and over India. No prize for guessing what the findings will be.
It needs no test pilot (although the writer admits to being one) to conclude that the turmoil within the civil aviation sector owes primarily to archaic organizational and manning models that are practised by Rajiv Gandhi Bhawan to deal with a sector that is not only one of the most dynamic in the world but also one involving significant technological sophistication and business innovation. To those wishing to extricate Indian civil aviation from what is the equivalent of the dark ages, it is suggested that a report on a national aeronautics policy submitted to the government by the Aeronautical Society of India in 2004 (another admission, this writer was one of the vice-presidents of the society at the time) needs to be dusted and resurrected. In essence this recognizes aviation as one of the most significant technological influences of modern time and accordingly defines organizational and management models such that it empowers the nation. Until enlightenment dawns in favour of change, the hapless air traveller is condemned to venture into Indian skies on a wing and a prayer.
