India’s prospective regional carriers may find the going tougher than the major airlines; they need to maintain a strong safety focus. Much effort has gone into the airline industry’s excellent air safety record. Keeping it that way may prove an even bigger challenge.

Commercial aviation is expanding rapidly in many parts of the world. It is also becoming safer than ever. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), The 2011 global accident rate for Western-Built jets measured in hull losses per million flights) was 0.37—the lowest in history. Although even a single mishap is unfortunate, this works out to just one loss for every 2.7 million Flights. A hull loss is an accident in which the aircraft is destroyed or substantially damaged and not subsequently repaired. All told, in 2011, 2.8 billion people flew safely on 30 million jet flights and eight million turboprop flights worldwide.

Impressive performance and Indian commercial aircraft—all of Western origin—have contributed to it. However, every other day, there are reports from across the country of incidents that affect air safety and that might easily have resulted in a catastrophe. India’s airline industry is expected to grow at around eight per cent annually during the next 20 years, taking aviation services to many remote regions. But regional aviation brings safety challenges of its own, and luck cannot hold forever.

The government has been trying to take aviation to the distant reaches of the country by modernising the existing airports and building new ones, as well as by improving air traffic management. It has also announced several measures to promote regional aviation. But since the Ministry of Civil Aviation introduced its policy on scheduled regional air transport operations in August 2007, the country has seen just one proper regional airline which operated on a small scale then quickly vacated the scene. However, for many years, the major airlines and low-cost carriers have been operating flights from remote airports in Tier-II and Tier-III cities to the nearest metro or major city. This meets the definition of a commuter service or feeder service, both of which constitute regional operations.

Colgan Caution

The United States has the most extensive regional network in the world, with regional aircraft constituting 36 per cent of its commercial fleet. Half of its scheduled flights involve mainly, small regional carriers ferrying a quarter of the daily tally of passengers. Three-fourths of the US airports would be bereft of scheduled services but for the regional. And whenever aviation safety is discussed, Colgan Air Flight 3407 comes up.

Flight 3407 was a regional airline flight that crashed on February 12, 2009, as it was coming to land at Buffalo Niagara Airport, killing 50 people. The Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 turboprop was on an instrument approach when the pilots failed to react correctly to a stall warning. They attempted to pull the nose up as the plane was losing airspeed, causing a fatal loss of lift. The aircraft subsequently spiralled out of control and crashed well short of the threshold.

From the investigation, it emerged that the flight instruments were not being properly monitored by the pilots—an indication of lack of situational awareness. It was not entirely their fault—they may not have been adequately trained to respond to aerodynamic stall situations. Fatigue also probably contributed to their inattention, since both pilots had been at the base airport overnight and all day prior to the 9:18 p.m. final departure. What rings a bell in the Indian context is that the Captain had flunked three Federal Aviation Administration “check rides” (proficiency tests), but only reported one failure in his job application to Colgan Air. Last year, Indian aviation was rocked by allegations of pilots not being anywhere near as they claimed—they had simply bought or fudged flying hours without bothering to actually fly. The US investigators also discovered that the Colgan Air co-pilot could not afford to live in the New York area with her low salary. The 24-year-old had commuted for many exhausting hours before joining duty.

The Colgan Air crash was symptomatic of much that can go wrong in off-the-beaten-track aviation—mainly inadequate training and insufficient regulation. It marked the culmination of a six-year period during which regional airlines accounted for five out of the six fatal accidents in the US. In four of those accidents, crash investigators cited pilot error as a contributory factor.

Reports and anecdotal evidence from around the world paint a disagreeable picture of regional aviation. Regionals are often a world in which relatively young, inexperienced, inadequately trained, low-paid, highly-stressed, fatigued pilots are flying many trips in a long work cycle. Their duty day may last up to 16 hours, several times a week. If they get to relax, it is certainly not in great comfort. Their plight is often in stark contrast with pilots of the major airlines who have more rigid qualifying requirements, receive better training and are better paid although they fly less frequently. Many pilots see regionals as an irksome stepping stone to a lucrative job with a major carrier. But even when the same carrier operates a mix of large and small aircraft, the more experienced pilots usually fly the biggest and the best airliners on the longest routes. They may perform just one take-off and landing in a day. On the other hand, the inexperienced pilots, who have to start somewhere, will always be on small planes on shorthaul flights involving perhaps a dozen or more take-offs and landings daily. And the majority of major accidents occur during the take-off and climb or the approach and landing phase.