By Air Cmde TK Chatterjee(retd)

A recent article in The Print about the grounding of the largest Flying Training Organisation (FTO) in India caught my attention since I have spent a good amount of time training pilots for civil aviation. India is a rapidly growing aviation market, and with a growing economy and a consequent boom in air travel, all existing airlines are expanding their fleet. This creates a huge demand for pilots with the basic requirement of a Commercial Pilots License, which the FTOs must meet.

The fundamental flaw in civil pilot training is that there is a massive conflict between business interests and the quality of training. The owners of FTOs are in the business to make money and here is the complex situation that arises due to the excessive cost of aviation training, aircraft maintenance, instructional staff remunerations, flight simulators, etc. Small enterprises with limited assets and shallow pockets therefore resort to compromises in all aspects of training. A question that needs to be answered is – whether the trainee is paying to buy a CPL or only paying for the training; the license eventually has to be earned by the trainee.

There is a basic difference between the training of military pilots and civil pilots. In my tenure at the Air Force Academy, the rejection rate was 30-35% on grounds of ‘inability to learn flying’. This term is not heard of in civil aviation training. At the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademy when I suspended the training of a female trainee on this ground, hell broke loose at DGCA. The trainee of course went on to accuse the institution of misogyny, caste and gender bias, etc with the Ministries of Civil Aviation and HR. Some over-enthusiastic officials of DGCA attempted to intimidate me by threatening to cancel my license, on the telephone, not in writing of course. They sent an inspection team to check me out too. I survived. Director IGRUA stuck to his guns and there were more cases of suspension of training on grounds of flying indiscipline and inability to learn to fly.

Flying is not natural to humans and training requires the achievement of specified standards within specified time frames. Latitudes are indeed embedded in the training schedules but when they are exhausted, hard decisions need to be taken, in the interest of flight safety, which the small enterprises do not, and will not, due to their business interests. This is the advantage of a government-run institution where profit is not the bottom line or a large private organisation that has a lot of financial resilience.

Commercial flying as a profession is a shortcut to big money with a minimum of academic qualification. This fact attracts young people who are usually mediocre in academics but with sufficient family money to afford the cost of training. That said, I have also come across brilliant students, but they were few and far between. With time, the demand for the technical abilities of pilots is ever increasing with increasing complexities in aircraft and their various systems. Military aviation quite rightly requires science graduates as minimum qualification whereas civil aviation requires just school passing certificates in any stream. But the principles of aircraft structures, avionics, engines, etc remain the same whether they are in a military or a civil aeroplane. So, the difference in basic education makes it more difficult to learn for the ab initios in the civil arena. This is one of the reasons why those who can afford to flock to foreign FTOs. The burden of ground subjects is much lighter there.

The same goes for the instructional staff. The higher remunerations in airline flying make the instructional job in FTOs a hugely less attractive option for young license holders. Most resort to this option to keep their licenses current while waiting to be selected by any airline or a general aviation operator. While instructional duties in the IAF are a career option, in the civil arena it is not so. The quality of training is only as good as the faculty.

Another drawback of the training system is that while the ground subjects are tested by the DGCA for the award of licenses, the flying tests are in-house affairs. There is no standardisation of flying standards. The buck therefore rests on the airlines to test the candidates thoroughly in ground subjects and simulators before recruiting them. This should not be the case. The fresh pass-outs should be industry-ready once they are awarded the CPL. In many countries, CPL awardees are not immediately employable. They need to gain further flying experience before joining any airline.

If the growing demand for pilots and the scent of profitability gives rise to the creation of a large number of FTOs, it may meet the numbers, but quality will be compromised for profitability and the regulator’s job will become that much more difficult. It is far more advisable to have a few large institutions of the scale of IGRUA in each cardinal zone of the country, government-run or in PPP mode, than many SMEs and have one centralised testing agency for the sake of standardisation of flying training. This will help ensure quality while meeting the growing demand for numbers.

It must never ever be forgotten that engines or whatever else may be an airplane’s heart, but a pilot is its soul. Pilot training therefore must aim at perfection, despite knowing that perfection is not achievable, but if we chase it sincerely will surely catch excellence.

(The author is an Indian Air Force Veteran)

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