The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has served a showcause notice on four senior officials of IndiGo for failing to ensure that pilots are offered corrective training to avoid accidents, following a surprise inspection at the airline’s facility in Gurugram.
The safety aviation watchdog found lapses in the monitoring of Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA), which is the process of collecting and analysing data from flights to improve their safety. These are collected for every flight and are basically pre-emptive measures to avoid accidents.
The DGCA, during a surprise check, discovered that in a number of cases “the corrective training was either not carried out or delayed,” records of such trainings were not maintained, actions recommended were “inconsistent” with the severity of events and pilots were not “made available” to undergo training. Besides, there was an absence of guidelines for carrying out this monitoring exercise.
The training sessions are conducted for pilots who are involved in “exceedances,” or those who exceed the prescribed limits during a flight — for example the rate of descent, rate of rotation, etc.
Earlier, the DGCA had served similar notices on officials of SpiceJet following a string of incidents involving the airline, including one where its plane veered off the runway at Mumbai airport, impacting operations for nearly three days.