Having just read the article about a joined drive by indian pilots, ATC and authorities to rid the Indian skies of foreign pilots, due to their "inability" to safely operate in India's "challenging topography", and their "hard accents" challenging ATC, I would like to offer several opinions, having tried real hard to curb my enthusiasm for writing "Indians want foreigners out, reeeaally?", and attempting to keep this civilized and at the level.
A suggestion of "challenging topography" unprofessional at best, and the captain whom the journo has interviewed seems to not have learned much during his career, having uttered such nonsense. I will argue that any proficient pilot, Commander or F/O, is fully capable of reading any and all charts and flying accordingly. Mangalore, just like Innsbruck is an airport which required qualification - again, this is freely available to anyone the company wants qualified for this airport. Suggesting that being born in India somehow grants special powers of topography-conquering is...well, bollocks.
Hard accents? Sure, everybody has his own accent. We laugh at some, we squint and try harder to understand some of the others, but if an ATC controller cannot understand an aircraft, than he has no business manning his station. Do the interested parties in India also propose the rest of the world banning Indian a/c from flying outside of the subcontinent, because their pilots will then presumably also have trouble understanding foreign ATC?
People like this, and statements like this make me sick. I have no doubt that the expat in question, although I do not know him, and now never will, was fully qualified, as was his Indian F/O. They either committed a tragic error, or suffered a catastrophic equimpent failure - either of which they paid for with their lives, and the lives of all souls on board.
The political trolls crawling into the papers can go and crawl back under the rock they crawled out from.
