Crucial DGCA Unit Meant to Audit Aircraft Safety Is Half-Empty and Neglected

The Wire

6 days ago

Mumbai: A crucial unit at the frontline of India's air safety apparatus, meant to keep a check on aircraft fitness, lies half-empty and neglected.
India's Directorate of Airworthiness (DAW), a unit within the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), is meant to conduct surprise technical checks on aircraft and ensure that private airline operators are not compromising on passenger safety.
The job is crucial: within the DGCA, the DAW is meant to certify whether aircraft are 'air-worthy', which, as per the International Civil Aviation Organisation, means to check whether it is safe to fly. India's DGCA, in its manual, admits that the DAW is meant to investigate defects in aircraft and 'suggest corrective actions to arrest trends', to 'investigate major problems or defects', and to perform 'periodic and unannounced surveillance' checks on private airline operators to check if they are following safety norms. It is also meant to monitor the maintenance processes that airlines adopt, and verify that they aren't cutting corners.
Yet, the DGCA has admitted, in a response to an Right to Information (RTI) query filed by this correspondent, that of the 310 total posts in the directorate, 133, i.e. 43% of them, are lying empty.
But even more worrying are the vacancies in the posts of airworthiness officers (AWO), the backbone of the DAW and the first line of oversight into aircraft safety and maintenance. Of the 121 posts created for such officers, only 47 have been filled by the DGCA. The remaining 74 lie empty, meaning a whopping 61% vacancy rate.
According to the DGCA's RTI response, despite such a high rate of vacancies, the pace of recruitment has been unhurried and sluggish. Since 2022, the DGCA has been able to appoint only 20 airworthiness officers, rather than fill up all the vacant posts.
Also read: Half the Positions at DGCA Vacant, Says Civil Aviation Ministry
Air-safety experts and insiders in the DGCA said such vacancies render the DAW toothless and powerless to be able to effectively monitor private airlines and their aircraft fleet.
'The airworthiness directorate is at the heart of air safety,' said Rajendra Prasad, a former director of the DAW who retired in June 2023. With such crippling shortages of manpower, Prasad said it was 'not possible at all for the DAW to function' and carry out its responsibilities.
'This situation benefits everyone: from those in the DGCA who don't want to work, as well as the private airline operators who can then cut corners in aircraft maintenance and safety without anyone watching,' Prasad said.
This is a part of a dangerous pattern of negligence the DGCA suffers from: The Wire had, on June 19 this year, reported how the Modi government has cut the budget allocated to Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) – under which DGCA falls –from Rs 3,113 crore in 2023-24 to Rs 2,357 crore in 2024-25, despite the country's aviation sector only growing. Even worse, the ministry's capital outlay has been slashed by 91% since the 2023-24 budget and it now stands at just Rs 70 crore this year from Rs 755 crore two years ago.
The Wire 's RTI query had asked the DGCA about the budget allotted to the airworthiness directorate. However, it said the information 'did not pertain to this office', and forwarded the query to another section for a response on July 10. Yet, 19 days on, there has been no further response from the DGCA.
The Wire has sent emails to both, the DGCA chief Faiz Ahmed Kidwai as well as the Press Information Bureau additional director general in-charge of the MoCA, Sanjay Roy, but they chose not to respond.
A dangerous shortag
The DAW's work – to perform both periodic, scheduled checks on airlines and surprise, unannounced checks, as well as track the maintenance systems that airlines employ to see whether they conform to standards – is crucial for India's aviation industry.
The DAW, among all the 13 different wings within the DGCA meant to conduct surveillance inspections, carries out the highest number of such inspections. In 2024, according to the DGCA's surveillance plan, the DAW was to conduct 1,246 surveillance inspections, and in 2025, it is meant to conduct 1,596 such inspections.
However, with 43% of the posts empty, many doubt the quality of these inspections.
A former airworthiness consultant, appointed by the DGCA, said that such inspections were often conducted hastily. 'We have a fixed target of inspections given to us each year which we must meet,' he said. 'If we don't have enough manpower, we do what anyone would in that scenario: rush through inspections, wrap them up as quickly [as possible] and move on to the next task at hand.'
Prasad, the retired DAW director, agreed, saying the 'quality' of inspections as well as those staffing the DAW had been dipping.
Also read: The DGCA Has Played Fast and Loose With Pilots' Wellbeing
A former Indian pilot in a commercial airline, who also served in the DGCA, said they often witnessed the poor quality of auditors in their job with the airline.
'Often, DAW auditors would come and not be able to inspect and survey the important parts of the aircraft and its maintenance. Instead, they would just focus on smaller issues that were just not as important,' the pilot said, recounting an episode where a DAW auditor pointed out how the crew seat's seat belt was worn out but refused to thoroughly check the aircraft for any major defects or flaws. 'The auditor was happy that he was able to point this out one, albeit minor, flaw and the airline was happy that there wasn't anything major the auditor could find. It was a win-win,' the pilot said.
Proof of negligence
The result of such shoddy work has been increasingly visible in India's civil aviation space.
Between January 2019 and July 24, India's domestic sector saw 2,353 technical faults in flights operated by Indian carriers, according to MoCA in the Rajya Sabha in July 2024, in response to a question raised by MP Sanjay Singh.
In the last week alone, the country saw at least four instances of aircraft developing technical snags, leading to cancellations or delays – an Air India flight with 182 passengers developed a mid-air snag and was forced to return to Calicut two hours after take-off, an Air India flight wasn't able to take off from the Hindon airport in Ghaziabad due to a technical glitch, a Goa-Indore IndiGo flight developed a technical snag just before it landed, whereas another Ahmedabad-Diu IndiGo flight was forced to abort take-off after it detected a technical snag just before it was about to fly.
In 2024, the country had 23 instances where domestic airline operators flouted air safety norms, the MoCA told Parliament in February this year. Twelve of these 23 instances came from Air India and its subsidiaries, including a serious incident when Air India paired non-qualified crew to operate a Mumbai-Riyadh flight last year.
Insiders argue that many of them could have been prevented, if the country's air safety apparatus was strong enough.
The pilot who was previously with the DGCA said that audits and inspections carried out by the DAW were essential because they 'were not reactive, they were predictive processes'.
'Such audits and inspections could help prevent major tragedies and accidents. The crux of a good safety system is how proactive it is in preventing accidents, not in how they react to incidents,' the former official added.