With the escalation in the business of budget airlines in India, the demand for pilots has gone up drastically. Hence, the quality of training methods for India’s pilots seems to be stooping to a ridiculously low point. The desperate airlines companies have started ignoring inconsistencies and are allowing under trained pilots to take massive responsibilities in the skies.
The minimum time required for most ‘training pilots’ is 1,000 commercial flying hours where as, it was reported that it is possible to obtain a pilot’s licence after mere 35 minutes of flying hours in India.
Pilot Anupam Verma claims that he received a certificate which said that he had completed 360 hours of in-flight training, but actually had spent only 35 minutes at the controls of the plane as a co-pilot.
The insufficient training has always kept him under-confident and skeptical about his skills. He said, “What if I was flying and had an emergency? I wouldn’t even know how or where to land? We’d kill not only the passengers, but we might crash in a village and kill even more people.”
While Verma’s points are very valid, concern about the quality of training methods for India’s pilots has been building over the past decade. In 2011, 18 pilots were suspected of using forged documents to gain certification. This made government of India review the licence of all 4,000 pilots in India.
The false logging of hours and the poor training program has made our fear shift from aircraft technicality to pilot reliability. Watch this video by Bloomberg to learn more:
All we can hope is that government takes strict action against this heinous practice that risks the lives of thousands of people everyday.
News Source: Daily Mail