Fake pilots licences

With reference to the news story titled, ‘Cockpit fraud: fears grow over India’s fake pilots’ (KT, March 24),I must say we had heard of fake driving licences but none could ever imagine in their wildest dreams that fake commercial pilot licences also existed!

Also, another worrisome factor is many youths from India go abroad to some unscrupulous flying schools and come back with substandard training or fail in flying exams but still mange to get pilot’s licence and are flying with some private Indian airlines. One of the reasons for this is the rapid expansion of civil aviation industry in India with new airlines propping up, leading to massive shortage of commercial pilots.

Though the decision taken by the regulator DGCA is late, it still a welcome move regarding carrying out third party audit of all flying schools in India and verifying the licences all new pilots. But, the important question is what the DGCA was doing all these years, especially when so many passengers lives were at stake? It is hard to believe this could happen without knowledge of the DGCA.

Hence India should act tough and put in a place a system to rule out such errors in the future. The government should impose stringent checks on flying schools and thoroughly check and verify the documents of all the new pilots so that the confidence of air travellers is brought back.