NEW DELHI // The Mangalore air crash has underlined fears about safety gaps in India's booming airline industry and raised doubts about whether infrastructure can keep pace with rapid economic growth. It is still not clear what caused Saturday's crash, but pilots and aviation experts say regulatory oversight of safety and quality control are often poor. Staff training standards are also falling, they say.
Although India has had few major accidents in recent years, half a dozen mid-air misses over the past 12 months have underscored the safety issues. Last year, an Indian Airlines plane with about 150 passengers on board barely avoided a collision over Mumbai with an army helicopter that was part of the Indian president's entourage. Indian media regularly report on routine checks finding pilots reporting drunk for duty. In one incident last year, pilots and crew were involved in a mid-air scuffle, leaving no one at the controls of the aircraft.
"The Air India Express crash was waiting to happen," said A Ranganathan, an airline safety consultant and pilot instructor. "Safety standards in Indian aviation have been on the wane for the past six years," he said. "Efforts are being made to correct the drift, but the systematic rot is so deep we are not likely to see any improvement in safety unless drastic changes are made." Sustained robust growth has put more money in people's pockets, spurring air travel and an exponential growth in the number of low cost airlines. In the past five years, domestic passenger traffic has tripled and international traffic doubled.
But infrastructure may not have kept pace, and a shortage of staff may be stretching both airlines and traffic control staff. According to the Indian Commercial Pilots Association, 78 per cent of crashes took place due to fatigue-related human error. "You also need to augment the strength of air traffic control which is stretched," said Kapil Kaul, the head of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation in south Asia.
The hilltop airport at Mangalore had other geographical challenges, and critics say the runway, though adequate for landing the Boeing 737 that crashed, was neither long enough nor wide enough to leave room for error. While it was yet to be established if the accident was related to wider problems in India's aviation industry, experts say a lack of training, overworked staff and inadequate infrastructure compounds the situation.
For instance, only seven radar systems served Indian airspace and only big airports had the latest low-visibility landing systems, a senior official of the Airports Authority of India said. "A disaster was waiting to happen and we have been very lucky to have had no major accidents in the past 10 years," the official added. In April 2008, Kanu Gohain, the then director general of civil aviation, told the Mint newspaper that India had just three inspectors for 10 commercial airlines and 600 planes.
That number has increased, but many remain undertrained and a backlog of lapsed inspections may take years to clear. A 2006 safety audit by the International Civil Aviation Organisation listed India as worst on "technical personnel qualification and training". As the airline sector expanded, a shortage of pilots was met by hiring foreign pilots, 565 of whom are now flying. But the government has ordered airlines to replace them with Indians by next summer, raising concerns about how the country will be able to produce enough qualified pilots so quickly.
There are also calls to make inquiries into air accidents transparent. "To my knowledge in the last 50 years no inquiry report has been made public," Mr Kaul said. "There is also the need for an independent safety board." * Reuters