The aviation safety watchdog, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), has suspended Air India’s Chief of Flight Safety following lapses discovered in aspects such as accident prevention that included fabricated reports of internal inspections carried out by the airline.
The DGCA has suspended Captain Rajeev Gupta from the role of Air India’s Chief of Flight Safety for a period of one month, it said in a press statement. The regulator has also ordered Air India to take action against an unnamed auditor involved in the lapses and has raised concerns over shortage of requisite technical man power in the airline. The airline said in response that it was making efforts to improve the organisation’s safety culture.
The DGCA action follows an inspection it carried out at Air India’s headquarters in Gurgaon on July 25 and 26 when it unraveled fabricated reports for all 13 safety checkpoints it inspected randomly across various operational domains such as cabin surveillance, cargo, ramp and load management.
The DGCA’s investigation, which relied on CCTV footage, auditee statements, official records and passenger manifests that the inspections claimed to have been done internally at stations such as Mumbai, Goa, and Delhi were in fact not carried out, and that false reports were generated after DGCA’s request.
In another glaring finding, the DGCA team discovered that in an instance of cabin surveillance the airline had claimed to have conducted on July 16, 2023, the auditor it identified was actually a passenger travelling with family members on the flight.
It also found that that there was poor oversight over the pre-flight medical examination where alcohol consumption tests for pilots are conducted. This included failure to inspect the facility where the test is conducted and failure to record test readings and merely marking all items as satisfactory without actual verification.
The regulator also found that the checklists were signed by an auditor from the Quality Management System Department, whose functions did not comply with DGCA’s requirements.
Air India in a statement said, “We are sparing no effort to uplift the culture of safety and diligence to contemporary standards, through clarifying requirements, training and stricter consequence management.”
