Fix the pilot shortage

DGCA needs to streamline its regulations

Passengers have been inconvenienced by a series of flight cancellations in recent days and weeks, particularly by market leader IndiGo. The budget airline, which has more than 40 per cent of market share, has tried to get ahead of the last-minute cancellation problem by effectively shutting down about 30 flights a day, which, it says, represent only 2 per cent of its flights. On Wednesday, however, it had cancelled almost 50 flights. IndiGo has said that weather conditions and airport disruptions had required it to “re-roster” its crew, and insisted that its regular operations would be resumed by the end of March. However, the problem that IndiGo is facing is structural and not a cyclical one.

India has seen extremely quick growth in the aviation sector. It has been the fastest-growing domestic air travel markets for four years in succession; last calendar year, the number of passengers grew 18.6 per cent over 2017. Last October was the 50th consecutive month of double-digit growth. However, despite this firm growth in demand, supply has been constrained. It is not that there is a shortage of airline options, or that airlines have a shortage of aircraft. The problem is that qualified pilots, particularly those who have the credentials to sit in the commander’s seat on a passenger flight, are too thin on the ground. It is believed that about 100 new aircraft will be added to the Indian civil aviation fleet in the next year. Each aircraft should be associated with 10-12 pilots. India currently has fewer than 8,000 pilots. When the number of additional aircraft is seen together with the current deficit of pilots, it appears that there will be a need for over 1,500 pilots over the next year. Even fewer of these will qualify as commanders, given the more onerous requirements for that post. The number of commanders that were recruited in 2017-18 fell by 10 per cent.
 

This is clearly approaching a crisis. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, or DGCA, had better consider what measures it could take to ease this sharp supply constraint. It will, at least in the short and medium terms, be necessary to recruit more qualified pilots from abroad — but, unfortunately, there is a tightness to this segment of the labour market worldwide. Even so, the DGCA’s regulations on foreign pilots will have to be relaxed — there are currently fewer than 350 such pilots in India. Bureaucratic delays are also a problem: The time taken to clear such a pilot by the DGCA can also be 40-60 days, which is too long. The DGCA insists on arcane host-country copies of documents, for example; and foreign pilots frequently have to be sent home to their countries to be re-verified by their local police. Meanwhile, the longer-term solution is to ensure that there are more and better flying schools in the country, and that education loans are more easily available for those who want to become qualified pilots. The requirements for flying instructor in India have been artificially enhanced by the DGCA and must be rationalised. If supply constraints continue in the civil aviation industry, the blame lies squarely at the regulator’s door.