DGCA's ranking reveals serious quality problems in India's pilot training

The first rankings of registered flying training organisations (FTO) in India by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) bear a distinctly down-to-earth message. None of these schools made it to the top two categories of the aviation regulator’s ranking of A+ and A. Twenty-two academies qualified for the B ranking and 13 were ranked C. In short, the bulk of India’s FTOs are either “average” or “above average” — the B ranking indicates a score between 70 per cent and 50 per cent and the rankings suggest that only a handful make it to the upper cohort. Those in the C category have been issued notices for “self-analysis and improvement” and may fall under additional DGCA scrutiny. Notably, government-sponsored FTOs figure quite low down in the rankings. FTOs graduate between 800 and 1,000 holders of commercial-pilot licences a year but this number is expected to rise. In fact, this regulator assessment of underperformance by domestic FTOs comes at a time when the demand for pilots is rising significantly — from 6,000 to 7,000 working pilots today to 30,000 over the next 15 years — as leading Indian airlines place mega orders for new aircraft.

 

A granular look at the ranking criteria the DGCA has applied is concerning. It suggests that the principal problem lies in lack of training infrastructure and relatively lax safety standards, both of which account for a 60 per cent weighting. For instance, the regulator assigns the heaviest weighting of 40 per cent to “operational aspects”, which cover such parameters as the student-to-aircraft ratio, student-to-instructor ratio, fleet size, and availability of ground schools and simulators. Safety standards carry a weighting of 20 per cent — and they include the number of accidents and incidents in the preceding 12 months. 

More to the point, these courses are not cheap. For instance, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi, which operates under the Ministry of Civil Aviation and has been rated Category C by the DGCA, takes an upfront fee of ₹30 lakh for a commercial pilot’s licence (which includes 200 hours of flying). This fee excludes the “type rating”, which pilots must obtain to fly specific aircraft and it adds  another ₹15-20 lakh to the bill. In all, ₹40-60 lakh is a fairly typical outlay for a trainee pilot. Those looking for another flight path can opt for airline-sponsored programmes (not rated by the DGCA), but these, though of relatively good quality, can cost as much as ₹1 crore. Worse, this substantial expenditure on pilot training, on which families often expend large parts of their savings, need not guarantee a job since the bulk of the demand for pilots in Indian aviation is for experienced captains rather than newly trained pilots.

 

Given the revelations of this first exercise, the DGCA has done signal service for the hundreds of young women and men with high aspirations to fly to join the great Indian aviation boom. The fact that the ranking exercise will be conducted within a narrow frequency of twice a year — on April 1 and October 1 — will reduce the chances of FTOs gaming the system in the interval. For the regulator, the critical challenge, implicit in all institutional rankings, is to maintain the veracity of the system with meaningful checks so that the exercise is not reduced to mechanical box-ticking. The increasingly crowded Indian skies demand such rigour.