DGCA wants cabin crews to fly light. Literally

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

AI staff will be redeployed, size to be cut by hal...Govt approaches Ratan Tata for heading AIAir India employees to get salaries by July 14Air India employees to get salaries by July 14

New Delhi, Jul 16: Size does matter. And the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) seems to have kept this in mind while laying down latest norms for the airline crews.

The DGCA's latest guidelines, pertaining to obesity, have extensively defined how to measure fatness in a person and what are the limits required for those applying for flight crew licences. It has issued rules disallowing any individuals to be a part of the aircrew of any aircraft if they do not meet a certain criteria of weight.

The move follows a Supreme Court order against overweight airhostesses.

Global organisations such as the FAA (US) and the EASA (Europe) are continuously in the process of investigating all near accidents and incidents, in order to finetune the laws that govern the aviation sector in their respective domains.

The civil aviation requirement (CAR), with an apt heading of 'obesity and commercial aircrew' has gone ahead and described a number of ways to first define how to measure if a person is overweight and then goes on to say what the minimum standards required to be a licenced aircrew member.

Giving justification for the new rules, the CAR says, “Overweight and obese individuals are at increased risk for many diseases and health conditions, including hypertension, dyslipidemia, Type 2 diabetes mellitus, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea etc.”

“The medical implications of obesity are more of a cause for concern for the employer than the regulatory body, in view of the nature of the disability and its ability to cause acute incapacitation,” it adds.

The eight-page document then goes on for three pages to describe the various scientific ways to measure if a person is overweight or obese. “Methods to measure body fat include BMI, Hip Waist Ratio, skinfold thickness, underwater weighing, bioelectrical impedance, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA), and computerized tomography,” it says.

The rules also define something known as skinfold measurement which is one of the most popular methods to measure body composition. The method requires the use of a skin caliper is needed to measure skinfold thickness. Another method given is called Lean Body Mass (LBM), which is essentially predicted by using a complex and imperfect equation.