Last week saw another mishap at Redbird aviation in Baramati. Luckily, like the one a few days before this, the mishap wasn’t fatal. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) sprung into action and decided to suspend training at Redbird. The categorisation between incident / accident will draw its own criticism when that happens but the whole incident puts one thing in focus again – pilots.
The same week, Air India Express’s CEO spoke about more than doubling its pilot count in the near future with the current strength of pilots in the range of 400 or so. The last few years have seen the government invest and encourage the starting of pilot training schools, which has led to some schools starting and another set of schools in the process of being started. At the same time, expensive cadet training programs are being advertised – directly and indirectly, including by airlines which do not have an operating permit yet.
On one side, we have airlines looking around for pilots to fly the 1,000+ planes which are on order and on another there are pilots who are unemployed. Both sides have their own stories to tell. The pilots talk about the expensive bonds, cost of multi-engine, red tape and more while the airlines talk about the quality or rather the lack of it.
The domestic flying schools are important to keep the costs low, but how does one check the quality? The existing measures clearly need a refresh to ensure that mishaps can be avoided and quality can be maintained and increased. Come to think of it, most of the country has fair weather – especially so in peninsular India where more air strips are coming up or becoming operational. We potentially have the ability to train pilots beyond India but we are struggling to train for India at the moment. Like most things – it will all boil down to Quality, before scaling up the quantity.
Look at any of the ways, the scream is for “pilots, pilots and more pilots” with airlines wanting them and the flying schools trying to produce them. In the end we dont produce quality, we will continue to see two graphs climbing high – one showing the need of pilots and another showing the count of employed pilots.
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