DGCA starts safety audit of all airlines

Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 20

Days after after the plane crash in Kerala’s Kozhikode, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has launched a special safety audit of all domestic airlines operating in and from India, an official said.

It will be a complete FOQA (Flight Operations Quality Assurance) audit, he added.

The FOQA is a process of obtaining and analysing all kinds of data from flights to improve the safety, efficiency and efficacy of future flight operations, he said.

“All Indian airlines will undergo the special safety audit that has begun. In the first phase, we are auditing SpiceJet and Air India,” the official said, adding that it was a process that had been taken up after auditing all airports in India that received heavy rain during the monsoon season.

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) manages more than 100 airports in the country, including the one in Kozhikode. However, major airports like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad are managed by private companies.

On August 7, a B737NG aircraft of Air India Express with 190 people on board overshot the runway and crashed at the Kozhikode airport amid heavy rain, killing 18 persons, including the pilots.

The two leading pilot unions of Air India on August 13 had sought a meeting with Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri to discuss matters related to working conditions and flight safety.

“Our pilots are constantly facing the challenges of Covid-19, bad weather, ill-designed flight duty time limitations (FDTL), and several extensions and dispensations given by the DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation),” the Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association (ICPA) and Indian Pilots’ Guild (IPG) had written to Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri.