Are We A Safe Aviation System?

We are way below global standards of aviation safety, comments CAPT A RANGANATHAN and points out that what the system lacks are professionalism and transparency.

- Capt A Ranganathan

The past one year, if you take the last week of 2016 to the end of 2017, began with the Jet Airways B737 accident at Goa to the ICAO USOAP (International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme) audit that ended on December 16, 2017.

In 2016, 422 air safety violations were detected against 275 violations in 2015. Last year, there were 375 violations until November 2017. There have been overruns and excursions to the side of the runway by almost all the airlines. Incidents of crew fatigue triggering alerts by fighter jets have taken place. There were several cases of engine failures and bird strikes. Yet, we claim that the system is very safe!

The statement by Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha in Parliament recently confirms that the Regulator had failed to ensure safety in the sky, “Lack of proper system to facilitate management of the distribution and revision of operational documents” and ‘accident/ incident reporting system is not proper’ were among the salient audit observations that Sinha mentioned. The ministry and DGCA should go back to the accident in 2007!

It may be mentioned that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) report on the Jet Airways ATR accident (which was covered up as an incident!) on July 1, 2007 had the following findings:

‘The aircraft manufacturer, a few months earlier to the accident, had published a revised Flight Crew Training Manual covering recovery action on bounced landing. However, it was disseminated to the pilots only a month and a half after the accident. I brought this to the attention of the Minister Praful Patel, during the 6th CASAC meeting in my presentation in 2011. The same deficiency is present even in 2017 and it is a clear reflection on the failure of the Regulator’.