Air India Ltd did not provide mandatory cockpit training to most of its international flight crew for over two years, violating regulatory norms and which could have potentially led to the Air India Express crash in 2010, according to an internal email. The inquiry into the flight IX-812 crash in Mangalore, on May 2010 which killed 158 people, pointed to poor crew resource management (CRM) as a key reason for the worst crash India had seen in a decade.
CRM training for pilots is primarily meant to improve air safety and focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership and decision making. It was started in 1979 internationally after it was found that most aviation accidents occurred because of human error. In India, CRM training is to be done for all pilots every year, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), according to a Mint report by Tarun Shukla.
“The court of inquiry into the Mangalore accident has published its report, wherein inadequate CRM has played a significant role,” AS Soman, Executive Director of Operations and Customer Service, Air India, wrote in a June 3, 2011 email to then airline chairman Arvind Jadhav. “A comparison of the tables in the report forwarded herewith clearly indicates that practically no CRM training was conducted in the operations department between 2007 and 2010.”
The court of inquiry report directly attributes the crash to poor CRM and a lack of “assertive training” for the first officer of flight IX-812, who did not challenge any of the errors made by the commanding pilot. “...the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) recordings reveal low standards of CRM by both pilots... The pilots were not working in harmony...” the email said, quoting the crash report.
Air India Express, the low-cost international arm of Air India, did not have a safety or a training department, and used Air India’s facilities, calling into question if the crew that operated the IX-812 flight complied with all the requirements of the aviation regulator, said Mohan Ranganathan, an Air Safety Expert and Member of the government-appointed Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Council, which was established after the Mangalore crash to review air safety.
“None of the mandatory training has ever been stopped,” an Air India spokesman said.
Ranganathan said the email points out that DGCA’s rules for scheduled transportation was not followed. “How did this also pass muster with the IATA-certified audits?” the international benchmark for safety among airlines, he asked.
The email also said there were indications that records were potentially fudged to portray better results. “Use of registers with no control over entries show instances of mismatching signatures (especially for training captains and senior executives), overwritten dates, altered entries and logging of navigation classes as CRM classes,” the email said. “No CRM manuals were issued to crew. One manual with (outdated) first generation CRM material (was) maintained only for audit purposes.”
International and local audits were conducted recently and “we have not been found wanting in any training”, the Air India spokesman said.
“This is another example of a farce being played out by DGCA when they do safety audits. Every accident India has witnessed since 2000 has identified CRM failure as a major factor,” Ranganathan added. “The two fatal crashes involved the Air India family—Alliance Air (in 2000) and Air India Express. Stating that DGCA has given them (Air India) a clean chit cuts no ice.” He said he was curious why Soman, as the head of operations and safety, allowed such a serious lapse to take place during his tenure.
An Air India official said that the airline was not inferior in any training aspect and dismissed the CRM findings as “petty political bickering between two factions within the airline”.
Air India Express flies typically to West Asia from southern Indian states. It is a subsidiary of Air India run under Air India Charters Ltd and operates 175 international flights and 15 domestic flights every week. The carrier ferried 2.5 million passengers in the year ended March 2011. An audit done last year by DGCA had found that Air India Express did not have a human resources department and needed to lean upon parent Air India for nearly everything, even in situations that required quick decisions, resulting in operational handicaps, Mint reported on 5 December.
“It was surprising to note that even (for) the photocopier, (Air India Express) was dependent on Air India,” the DGCA report said, warning that letters exchanged between Air India and Air India Express indicated “total interference in the working of Air India Charters, which is detrimental to the overall progress and directly infringes on air safety”.
The carrier did not have either a DGCA-approved chief of safety or deputy chief of safety. “The airline seems to have purposely overlooked some deficiencies,” the report had said, citing at least three instances where a pilot made grave errors but was promoted to fly bigger aircraft instead of being penalised.
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