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Fears over air safety if Air India pilots are replaced

The news that civil aviation minister Ajit Singh is exploring the option of terminating the jobs of a majority of Air India pilots and hiring fresh recruits has alarmed many in the airline industry who fear that flight safety will suffer.

MUMBAI: The news that civil aviation minister Ajit Singh is exploring the option of terminating the jobs of a majority of Air India pilots and hiring fresh recruits has alarmed many in the airline industry who fear that flight safety will suffer. The AI pilots have been striking for the past month.

Air India recently put out advertisements calling for pilots trained on Boeing aircraft. So far the airline has terminated over 100 pilots and, according to sources, termination letters are being sent to many more.

Capt Manoj Hathi, ex-Air India director of operations and flight safety and an examiner/instructor on Boeing 747-400, categorically said that replacing 400-odd "company-experienced pilots" with fresh recruits could have repercussions on flight safety. "In the 1960s, Japan Airlines replaced its American pilots with Japanese pilots with minimal experience on jets. They had a large number of American pilots and replacing them en masse was a bad decision as the airline had more than half-a-dozen accidents in the next nine years, all attributed to lack of experience, training and pilot error,'' said Hathi.