IndiGo meltdown revives debate over who should run DGCA

Calls for a technically qualified aviation regulator are not new. The issue was raised as early as 1997 in a landmark aviation safety report by Air Marshal J.K. Seth, which recommended an autonomous regulator staffed by domain experts.

The large-scale disruption faced by IndiGo in early December has once again highlighted concerns around the lack of specialist leadership at India's aviation regulator, with experts arguing that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has increasingly become a posting for career bureaucrats rather than aviation professionals, Mint reported.

Over the past 17 years, the DGCA has been headed by 10 generalist officers, all drawn from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), with critics pointing out that none had deep technical experience in aviation, Mint said, citing industry experts. The last non-IAS chief of the regulator was Kanu Gohain, a technocrat who rose through the DGCA's ranks and retired in 2008.

Since then, the post has been occupied exclusively by bureaucrats, including the current director general Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, who took charge in January, Mint reported.

The debate resurfaced after IndiGo cancelled more than 4,500 flights in the first week of December due to a pilot shortage, following the implementation of new DGCA norms capping pilots' flying hours between midnight and 6 am. The scale of the cancellations led the civil aviation ministry and DGCA to step in, cut the airline's daily operations by 10%, and seek explanations from IndiGo chief executive officer Pieter Elbers and chief operating officer Isidre Porqueras, Mint said.

While the episode was largely attributed to operational lapses by IndiGo, questions were also raised about regulatory oversight. "They did not spot the craters in time, they did not prune the expanded schedules in time, nor did they verify whether pilots were available for the schedule, even when the problems were visible in November," Sanjay Lazar, aviation safety specialist and CEO of Avialaz Consulting, told Mint.

Concerns around regulatory capability have also been sharpened by a fatal Air India crash earlier this year. Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing at least 260 people. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is still probing the causes of what has been described as India's worst civil aviation disaster, Mint reported.

"There is a clear requirement for a DG with technical competence and sector knowledge. That effectively ended with Kanu Gohain," said Captain Mohan Ranganathan, a former airline instructor pilot. "You cannot put someone in a regulator's post who does not understand the subject," he told Mint.

Emails sent to the DGCA and the civil aviation ministry did not receive responses till press time, Mint noted.

Calls for a technically qualified aviation regulator are not new. The issue was raised as early as 1997 in a landmark aviation safety report by Air Marshal J.K. Seth, which recommended an autonomous regulator staffed by domain experts. "The Seth report clearly flagged the need for an independent, specialist-led aviation regulator, but its recommendations were never implemented," Amit Singh, CEO of aviation safety think tank Safety Matters Foundation and a former pilot, told Mint.

Experts such as Lazar have reiterated that the DGCA should ideally be led by someone with hands-on experience as a pilot, engineer or aviation technologist.

The current DGCA chief Kidwai is a 1996-batch IAS officer who earlier served as additional secretary in the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Mint reported.

Industry observers have also drawn comparisons with global aviation regulators. The US Federal Aviation Administration is led by Bryan Bedford, a former airline chief executive with more than three decades of aviation experience. Europe's aviation safety agency is headed by Florian Guillermet, who has worked in air traffic management and at Air France. In the UK, the Civil Aviation Authority is chaired by Sir Stephen Hillier, former chief of the Royal Air Force, while its CEO Rob Bishton is a qualified commercial pilot, Mint said.

Beyond the absence of technical expertise, frequent leadership changes have also been flagged as a concern. IAS officers heading the DGCA typically serve for just one or two years, leading to policy discontinuity, experts told Mint.

"The director general is often on deputation and moved out within a short period, which affects continuity in regulatory oversight," Singh said, adding that India needs a long-term DG who understands the complexity of the aviation ecosystem.

The urgency of reform is underscored by the rapid expansion of Indian aviation. IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air together plan to add nearly 1,800 aircraft to their fleets by 2035, a scale of growth that will require strong, technically sound regulatory supervision, Mint reported.