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India's overall aviation safety score to improve post UN body audit


NEW DELHI: India's ranking in the overall aviation safety score given by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is set to improve significantly.

Following an audit last year, the United Nation's aviation arm had lowered India's "effective implementation" (EI) from 65.82% to 57.44% against world average of 62% mainly on the issue of air traffic controllers' (ATCO) licensing. An ICAO team again audited the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) from November 12-21 to see if the shortcomings had been addressed to make flying safer, and before leaving, told the Indian authorities that the country's EI score could rise to 74%.

The overall EI figure is arrived at as an aggregate of individual scores in eight fields like legislation, organisation, personnel licensing and airworthiness of aircraft. This score gives an overall picture of how a country is complying with global aviation safety practices under different heads.

Asked how the ICAO audit went, DGCA chief BS Bhullar said: "ICAO team have concluded their validation process of DGCA oversight system in areas of legislation, organisation, air navigation services, aerodromes and accident investigation last Wednesday (Nov 21). As per their protocol, they only share verbally the provisional outcome at the end of the exercise. Provisional result is encouraging and likely to improve our EI by about 17%. This may further go up significantly once ATCO licensing is completed by DGCA as per mandate of Ministry. These are provisional results which need to be ratified by ICAO HQ team. This process takes about three months."

The agency's "universal safety oversight audit program" (USOAP) audit last November had objected to ATCOs being employees of the same organisation that licences them, the Airports Authority of India (AAI). This, they said, was akin to an airline issuing flying licence to pilots and then making them fly its planes. Due to this the EI of the area of personnel licensing alone fell from 89.47% to 26.04%. India has now decided an external agency, DGCA, will issue licences to ATCOs.

At an EI of 57.44%, India's score was lower than Pakistan and North Korea and just over that of small countries like Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Samoa.

"ICAO audited five areas this November - organisation, legislation, aerodromes, air navigation services and accident investigation. In the pre-departure briefing, they told us our scores in all of these will rise and very substantially in three area," said the source.

Meanwhile, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also audited the DGCA on October 31 and November 1. The American aviation safety regulator had made about 30 observations earlier this July. "Their biggest finding in July was that some charter/private plane operators from India fly to US using aircraft and the DGCA does not have flight operations inspectors type-rated on those planes. That issue has been resolved and the FAA audit also went off very successfully for India. We will retain our category one safety ranking," said sources.