Aviation industry to suffer pilot crunch following DGCA ruling to phase out foreign pilots

Now over 1,000 foreign captains, expatriate pilots are part of the Indian airspace. Their tenure, however, appears to be tenuous. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) wants all aviation operators to phase out foreign pilots and replace them by trained Indian pilots. “Foreign pilots will be phased out in five years,” Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has told Parliament, adding, “In another five years, India will need 6,000 more certified captains.”
Where these numbers will come from is a matter of conjecture: the nation’s premier training institute, Rashtriya Uran Akademi, can train just 40 pilots a year. Patel’s ministry is upgrading infrastructure to make that 100 a year and by 2010, it will have established another institute. The ministry has also increased the upper age limit from 60 to 65 years. But, as Sean Butler, director, sales and marketing, Parc Aviation, says, “There will be a need for 8,000 pilots by 2020.”
Indian aviation is likely to first suffer a resource crunch and then, a glut. Currently, a new entrant needs two years to get adequate flying experience for a commercial pilot’s licence (cpl). So, most trainees rush to foreign flying schools. An estimated 6,000 young Indians have already embarked on training courses over the last 18 months.
But is the growth in Indian aviation actually enough to absorb these numbers? India currently has less than 400 aircraft, and orders for the next 5-10 years will add 500 more. Current policy requires a manning level of five sets of crew per aircraft (that’s 5,000 more pilots). Half would be First Officers (from the current crop of trainees).
And the growing numbers still don’t solve the problem of the lack of trained captains. CPL holders can graduate to a higher grade only after three years, a gap that’s being filled by expatriate pilots now. They are also filling positions that Indian pilots refuse. “Indian pilots don’t want to fly ATRs and we have to get foreign pilots for them,” Captain G. Gopinath of Air Deccan told TEHELKA. That’s also true for private small aircraft.
Now, with the present government wanting the expatriate pilots to be phased out, it’s quite likely that pilots are going to be spread very thin in the Indian airspace.
05/07/08 Krishn Kaushik/Tehelka