Poor infrastructure grounds aviation expansion plans

According to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation,India will be the world’s fastest growing air travel market for the next decade. The world’s largest plane makers are clamoring to strike deals in the market whose requirement is pegged at over 1,000 aircraft in the next 20 years.

To service such humongous demand,India needs 400 operational airports,in contrast to the current 90,according to data made available by the Civil Aviation Ministry. Air travel has bounced back post-recession and India’s airlines carried 17 million passengers until April this year,a 22 per cent spurt from the period a year ago.

On Saturday,the Air India Express crashed just after 6 am in foggy,foul weather in an airfield that has had several narrow misses so far but no major accidents. The airfield sits on the top of a flattened hill with sheer ravines on all sides.

Piecing together initial reports and survivor accounts,pilot error could be the cause of the crash. The pilot tried to abort a bad landing at the very last minute but could not take off. He was an expatriate.

Though airlines and civil aviation regulators have laid down requirements on pilots,expatriate pilots often fly on foreign licences and follow vastly different medical standards. The Director General of Civil Aviation is still to look into making pilot requirements uniform.

Air safety experts have incessantly demanded that the aviation regulator set up safety mechanisms such as autonomous air safety boards. “The demands of expansion are huge and there are inherent risks in the scenario,” says Capt Preetham Philip,formerly with Air Deccan and currently the COO Aviation at Deccan Cargo & Express Logistics. The density of flight traffic,the rising number of take-offs and landings,has added pressure on the infrastructure.

Only the New Delhi airport has the zero-visibility landing facility. In dreadful weather,pilots landing at the country’s other airports have to rely on their competence and experience,Capt Philip said.

Safety experts say the infrastructure at the newly privatised airports in Delhi,Mumbai,Bangalore and Hyderabad is modern. The other airports have a long way to go. The fast-paced expansion of airlines has also led to compromises in hiring pilots and engineers.

To add,air accident investigations are all too secretive. Findings become available after years,even decades. “For instance,the details on the helicopter crash involving the Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S R Reddy a year ago have just become available and airlines have lost valuable time in preventing similar accidents,” says Capt Philip,adding,“But that is Indian bureaucracy for you”.