India’s overall air safety oversight revised upwards to over 85%, DGCA informs

Representative image (Photo credits: Bloomberg)

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced on February 10 that India’s updated overall Effective Implementation now stands at 85.65 percent.

Effective Implementation (EI) measure is a country’s safety oversight capability, which can be calculated per element or as an overall measure.

The DGCA has received the final report of the ICAO Coordinated Validation Mission (ICVM) in India which is based on an audit conducted from November 9 to 16, 2022. During this period, the ICVM team reviewed the progress made in 137 protocol questions (PQs) and changed the status of 131 PQs to satisfactory, taking India’s overall updated EI up to over 85 percent.

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The DGCA said in a statement: “… Another ICVM was conducted from 9 to 16 November 2022, covering the areas of LEG, ORG, PEL, OPS, and AGA on-site, in India, while the area of AIR was validated virtually during the same period.”

“The ICVM team reviewed the progress in addressing 137 PQs, and following this review, the status of 101 PQs were changed to satisfactory and that of 1 PQ to not applicable, while the status of 35 PQs remained not satisfactory, resulting in an updated overall EI of 85.65 percent.”

The aviation regulator informed that since the scope of the ICVM did not include the areas of parameters such as AIG and ANS, the updated overall EI of 85.65 percent was calculated on the basis of the latest USOAP results on record for these two areas.

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The ICAO team also visited industry and service providers during their audit to validate the capability of India to supervise the activities of these service providers, airlines, and organisations.

The ICVM team had in 2018 reviewed the progress made by the Indian civil aviation industry vis-a-vis various parameters such as LEG, ORG, AIG, ANS, and AGA. Following this review, the overall EI was updated to 69.95 percent. Prior to that, in 2017, the USOAP audit of the civil aviation system of India generated an overall EI of 55.15 percent for the eight critical elements (CEs) of the state’s safety oversight system.