The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has drawn up stringent measures to tighten the selection process for pilots flying scheduled airlines in order to check the menace of fake licences which threatens passenger safety, according to Director General of Civil Aviation, Bharat Bhushan.
Talking to the media on the sidelines of an aviation security meet in Hyderabad, he said that the DGCA, has drawn up measures to tighten the selection process for pilots flying scheduled airlines to check the menace of fake licences which threatens passenger safety.
Bhushan said the pilot licensing fraud, which led the removal of an assistant director in his own office, is an aberration confined to few cases. He added that the DGCA would monitor the conduct of pilot training schools much more closely in regard to their certification on marks and flight hours to the candidates who pass out from the respective institutes, before issuing the pilot licenses.
The issue of fake licences came to the fore recently when the Delhi police arrested Captain Parminder Kaur Gulati, a woman pilot for IndiGo Airlines, after the DGCA found that she had been issued a commercial pilot?s licence in 2009 on the basis of a fake marksheet.
He said pilot certificates issued by foreign training institutes would also be independently verified from now on. DGCA has called a meeting of all pilot training schools. Of the 1,700 pilot licenses verified by the DGCA, so far only seven cases of fake qualifications in mark sheets and flight hours have been detected. These cases have been handed over to the Crime branch police.
Meanwhile, Bhushan said that the competition in the airline sector is set to increase in the days ahead as the sector had again started looking up from last year attracting more players in to the industry. Citing numbers, he said the domestic air travel market in India has crossed the 50 million mark registering 19% growth for the first time last year.