Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Number of safety inspectors fails to keep pace with air traffic growth

CHENNAI: Air traffic in southern airports may have grown almost eight-fold in the past 30 years, but the number of air safety inspectors monitoring the traffic has not increased during this period, raising serious concerns about how rigorously air safety is being checked.

The Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the air safety authority, is struggling to fill vacancies in its air safety wing. It is now operating with just two officers monitoring air safety in the 23 airports in southern India.

The DGCA had listed three positions of safety inspectors in Chennai, but cancelled one of these last week. The Directorate of Air Safety in Hyderabad is also supposed to have three officers, but none has been filled. Bangalore, the second largest airport in the south, does not even have an air safety office, and, consequently, operates with no inspectors.

The acute shortage of personnel means that in the southern airports outside Chennai, inspections are rare. “Regular inspections are a thing of the past,” an airport source said. “Inspectors are now forced to only conduct random inspections and, that too, very infrequently. Chennai is the only airport in the south where random checks are conducted at least once every month.”

As a result of the shortage of personnel, Chennai’s two inspectors now generally visit other airports to investigate specific incidents, so most of south India’s airports operate without regular inspections.

DGCA inspection teams are, in theory, responsible for awarding licences to airports to certify them, but licensing has now become a meaningless exercise. Only seven out of the 23 operating airports in south India are licensed. These are Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Vijaynagar in Karnataka, Kozhikode and Puttaparthy in Andhra Pradesh. Madurai, where a Rs.128-crore terminal project was inaugurated on Saturday, does not have a DGCA licence. “Sixteen airports are operating without licences, and no one is asking any question,” an official said.

Part of the problem is insufficient funding. The DGCA has not been able to expand its operations or staff since the 1980s. “The DGCA is pretty much the same now as what it was in my time, operating with the same number of officers,” said D. Krishnan, former deputy director of aerodromes, Airports Authority of India (AAI), and general secretary of the Air Traffic Controllers Guild between 1982 and 1988.

In Chennai, the DGCA operates out of a one-room office on the far edge of the cargo complex and has to rely on the AAI — whose operations it is responsible for inspecting —vehicles for access to the airport and to carry out checks. Another factor limiting the effectiveness of the organisation is its lack of independence. The International Civil Aviation Organisation recently conducted a safety audit of Indian airports that called for an overhaul of the organisation of air safety bodies in India. It recommended that the investigating authority, the DGCA, be separated from the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and not be part of the licensing authority.

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