India’s flight safety systems and passengers face “active threat”, review finds

India’s flight safety systems – and passengers – are facing an “existential threat,” according to a report by a group of the country’s lawmakers who have flagged grave staff shortages at the national air safety regulator.

A parliamentary panel undertook a review of the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in the wake of the June 2025 crash of Air India Flight 171 that killed 260 people in Ahmedabad. That examination has found “a profound and persistent shortage of technical and regulatory personnel,” at the regulator, where the recruitment gap is as high as 50%.

Ironically, with India’s aviation sector undergoing fast growth and as carriers acquire newer, more modern aircraft, the country’s airport infrastructure is struggling to keep up. “This deficit is not a mere administrative statistic,” the report signalled, explaining: “It is a critical vulnerability that exists at the very heart of India’s safety oversight system, occurring precisely at a time when the sector’s unprecedented growth demands more, not less, regulatory vigilance and capacity.”

India’s aviation regulator #DGCA finally follows Etihad, South Korea, Singapore in mandating checks on fuel control switches of Boeing planes in India after air India crash report outed a 2018 FAA advisory that the locking mechanism may be flawed. Good. 👍 – pls note that the… pic.twitter.com/TI4g6wq3wM

— barkha dutt (@BDUTT) July 14, 2025

Part of the staffing issue, the report found, stems from a “slow and inflexible” recruitment process that is outsourced to an agency, and a lack of enforcement over working time limits from the Airports Authority of India (AAI). With the lack of staff putting existing workers, some of whom are under-trained, under pressure, burnout is high and retention low, and the risk of controller error is increased, the MPs note, going as far as to say the shortage is an “active and ongoing threat to the safety of the flying public.”

Speaking to the BBC in July, the chief of the DGCA defended India’s aviation safety record. “If you look at global safety metrics, such as those published by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which track the number of accidents per million flights, India consistently performs better than the world average,” he said.

But the post-Ahmedabad review insists that “the current mismatch between recruitment and training capacity, coupled with operational overload, poses a direct and ongoing threat to airspace safety”, even attributing India’s high incidence of runway incursions and bird hits to the issue.

Despite accusing the regulator of not being “in a position to discharge its duties for which it was established”, among the report’s solutions it suggests granting full financial and administrative autonomy to the aviation safety regulator, as well as a full staffing audit, and the creation of a national Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS) for air traffic controllers. In addition, the report recommends mandatory pilot training for specific terrains and that all state-operated services be brought together under a unified national regulatory framework.

The Indian civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu assured parliamentarians in July that 190 of the over 500 empty roles at the DGCA would be filled by October – a promise that, if met, would leave 62% of the required positions still unfilled.