Aviation turbulence : India’s fragile sky and the costs of systemic neglect
|
Nil Konsam
India’s recent aviation crisis—triggered by a sudden roster change in the country’s largest airline and cascading into Nationwide cancellations and passenger stranding—cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate operational mishap. It is a symptom of a deeper institutional fragility that has been building steadily for over a decade. The incident has exposed not just an airline’s capacity shortfall, but the widening fault lines within India’s regulatory framework, the over-reliance on foreign systems and hardware, and the troubling degradation of public institutions entrusted with anticipating and preventing exactly such failures.
At the heart of the episode is a regulatory mis- judgment. In a sector where personnel planning is complex, aircraft utilisation tightly optimised, and crew training pipelines notoriously slow to scale, a sudden shift in roster norms was bound to cause supply-side shock. Pilots and flight operations support staff cannot be recruited, trained, type-rated, and deployed overnight. These facts are well known to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Their inability—or unwillingness—to anticipate the consequences places regulatory responsibility squarely at the Government’s door.
Yet the story is more layered. The disruption has amplified calls to expand pilot intake and domestic flight-training capacities. This raises a pointed question: who stands to benefit ? India’s flight-training ecosystem is dominated by private entities, several of them linked—directly or indirectly—to airline pro- moters, airport operators, or politically connected business groups. Thus, while no explicit collusion can be asserted, the alignment of incentives is unmistakable. A crisis that weakens an airline and pressures it to expand pilot requirements simultaneously strengthens entities already positioned to profit from training contracts and long-term supply agreements.
But the current turbulence cannot be understood through personnel issues alone. India’s civil aviation rests on a structural imbalance: we operate one of the world’s fastest-growing domestic markets with one of the world’s weakest indigenous aviation ecosystems. Nearly 80–85% of India’s commercial fleet is leased, mostly from Ireland- and Singapore-based lessors. Leasing is not inherently problematic, but India’s near-total reliance—far above global averages—creates financial vulne- rability, forex outflow, and regulatory risk. The Go First collapse and the subsequent friction with aircraft lessors under India’s insolvency regime illustrate how exposed the system is.
The dependence is even starker on the maintenance and technology front. An estimated 80–90% of India’s MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) spending flows abroad—to Dubai, Singapore, Germany, France, and OEM facilities elsewhere. India lacks certified engine-overhaul capacity for most modern commercial engines (CFM LEAP, Pratt & Whitney GTFs, Rolls-Royce Trent variants). Even heavy airframe checks for larger aircraft are often routed outside. Domestic MRO firms have long complained of a policy environment that is unpredictable, uncompetitive, and tilted toward foreign service providers. The 2024 reform introducing a uniform 5% tax on aircraft and engine parts was meant to correct this, but its impact will play out slowly.
Beyond hardware, India is deeply dependent on imported aviation software and operational systems. The booking engines that power airline ticketing, the-slot allocation tools used by airports, the crew scheduling algorithms, safety- management systems, and the baggage-handling automation frameworks— virtually all come from foreign vendors. While this is common worldwide, the difference lies in domestic capability. India has not cultivated a homegrown avia- tion software industry with globally certified products. Nor has it invested in regulatory digitalisation that matches international best practice. As a result, everything—from ticketing to turnarounds—is vulnerable to vendor concentration, licensing costs, and systemic failures originating far outside India’s control.
Meanwhile, the Government’s preferred narrative trumpets a different achievement: the accelerated construction of airports. New terminals, new runways, and dramatic time-lapse videos of infrastructure being unveiled at breakneck speed dominate official publicity. What receives far less attention is the second half of the aviation equation: airlines, regulators, technical capability, trained personnel, air navigation systems, and financial resilience.
Airports do not make aviation safe. Airports do not prevent cancellations. Airports do not improve aircraft reliability or reduce engine failures. Airports do not replace the complex operational capacities that keep aircraft in the air and passengers moving reliably.
Yet this infrastructure-heavy approach has become the governing logic. Invest in the visible; neglect the critical. Build glass and steel terminals; underfund oversight. Announce new airports; ignore staffing shortages. Showcase expansion; overlook systemic load-bearing capacity. The result is an ecosystem with glossy facades and fragile foundations.
The fragility becomes glaring during stress. The latest disruption showed how a single airline’s crew shortfall could paralyse airports across the country. Gate hold-ups, missed international connections, stranded students, medical passengers trapped mid-journey—such scenes are not isolated failures. They signal an ecosystem operating at the edge of tolerance. They reveal what aviation experts have long warned: that India is running a high-density, high-growth civil aviation sector on under-developed institutional musculature.
In the midst of the crisis, another troubling pattern emerged. As flights were cancelled and demand spiked on alternative routes, some airlines engaged in predatory pricing, with domestic tickets crossing Rs 1 lakh even on short-haul sectors. For a country where aviation has been positioned as an accessible middle-class service, such exploi- tative spikes are unacceptable. Price deregulation must not become a licence for opportunistic profitee-ring during system break- downs. The fact that such market behaviour was allowed to persist unchecked underscores a deeper policy vacuum.
The turbulence, therefore, is not merely about one airline’s rostering failure. It exposes what years of institutional weakening, regulatory complacency, and policy over-centralisation have produced: a system without buffers, without redundancy, and without the empowered, independent oversight needed in a sector that deals with human lives daily. Aviation cannot be micro managed through political announcements or bureaucratic firefighting. It requires stable rules, insulated regu- lators, technologically competent oversight, and long- term capability building.
India must confront four uncomfortable truths.
First, the Government’s regulatory apparatus must be strengthened, depoli-ticised, and granted functional autonomy. Aviation safety and operational reliability cannot depend on headline-driven decision-making.
Second, the country must accelerate the localisation of MRO, software systems, and operational technologies. No large aviation market can sustain itself while importing everything from engines to algorithms.
Third, the financial and institutional health of airlines must be treated as a National economic priority, not an afterthought. Airlines are not mere private companies—they are essential infrastructure.
Fourth, crisis-time predatory pricing must be addressed through transparent, rules-based interven- tion. Market freedom must not come at the cost of public trust.
India’s civil aviation success story is often told through three metrics: passenger growth, airport expansion, and airline orders. But true aviation success is measured in operational resilience, regula- tory foresight, indigenous capability, and public-interest orientation.
The recent fiasco is not an aberration. It is a warning. The question is whether India will treat it as an inconvenience to be forgotten—or a signal to rebuild the institutional spine of a sector that too many people now depend on, and too few truly understand.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
India’s recent aviation crisis—triggered by a sudden roster change in the country’s largest airline and cascading into Nationwide cancellations and passenger stranding—cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate operational mishap. It is a symptom of a deeper institutional fragility that has been building steadily for over a decade. The incident has exposed not just an airline’s capacity shortfall, but the widening fault lines within India’s regulatory framework, the over-reliance on foreign systems and hardware, and the troubling degradation of public institutions entrusted with anticipating and preventing exactly such failures.
At the heart of the episode is a regulatory mis- judgment. In a sector where personnel planning is complex, aircraft utilisation tightly optimised, and crew training pipelines notoriously slow to scale, a sudden shift in roster norms was bound to cause supply-side shock. Pilots and flight operations support staff cannot be recruited, trained, type-rated, and deployed overnight. These facts are well known to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Their inability—or unwillingness—to anticipate the consequences places regulatory responsibility squarely at the Government’s door.
Yet the story is more layered. The disruption has amplified calls to expand pilot intake and domestic flight-training capacities. This raises a pointed question: who stands to benefit ? India’s flight-training ecosystem is dominated by private entities, several of them linked—directly or indirectly—to airline pro- moters, airport operators, or politically connected business groups. Thus, while no explicit collusion can be asserted, the alignment of incentives is unmistakable. A crisis that weakens an airline and pressures it to expand pilot requirements simultaneously strengthens entities already positioned to profit from training contracts and long-term supply agreements.
But the current turbulence cannot be understood through personnel issues alone. India’s civil aviation rests on a structural imbalance: we operate one of the world’s fastest-growing domestic markets with one of the world’s weakest indigenous aviation ecosystems. Nearly 80–85% of India’s commercial fleet is leased, mostly from Ireland- and Singapore-based lessors. Leasing is not inherently problematic, but India’s near-total reliance—far above global averages—creates financial vulne- rability, forex outflow, and regulatory risk. The Go First collapse and the subsequent friction with aircraft lessors under India’s insolvency regime illustrate how exposed the system is.
The dependence is even starker on the maintenance and technology front. An estimated 80–90% of India’s MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) spending flows abroad—to Dubai, Singapore, Germany, France, and OEM facilities elsewhere. India lacks certified engine-overhaul capacity for most modern commercial engines (CFM LEAP, Pratt & Whitney GTFs, Rolls-Royce Trent variants). Even heavy airframe checks for larger aircraft are often routed outside. Domestic MRO firms have long complained of a policy environment that is unpredictable, uncompetitive, and tilted toward foreign service providers. The 2024 reform introducing a uniform 5% tax on aircraft and engine parts was meant to correct this, but its impact will play out slowly.
Beyond hardware, India is deeply dependent on imported aviation software and operational systems. The booking engines that power airline ticketing, the-slot allocation tools used by airports, the crew scheduling algorithms, safety- management systems, and the baggage-handling automation frameworks— virtually all come from foreign vendors. While this is common worldwide, the difference lies in domestic capability. India has not cultivated a homegrown avia- tion software industry with globally certified products. Nor has it invested in regulatory digitalisation that matches international best practice. As a result, everything—from ticketing to turnarounds—is vulnerable to vendor concentration, licensing costs, and systemic failures originating far outside India’s control.
Meanwhile, the Government’s preferred narrative trumpets a different achievement: the accelerated construction of airports. New terminals, new runways, and dramatic time-lapse videos of infrastructure being unveiled at breakneck speed dominate official publicity. What receives far less attention is the second half of the aviation equation: airlines, regulators, technical capability, trained personnel, air navigation systems, and financial resilience.
Airports do not make aviation safe. Airports do not prevent cancellations. Airports do not improve aircraft reliability or reduce engine failures. Airports do not replace the complex operational capacities that keep aircraft in the air and passengers moving reliably.
Yet this infrastructure-heavy approach has become the governing logic. Invest in the visible; neglect the critical. Build glass and steel terminals; underfund oversight. Announce new airports; ignore staffing shortages. Showcase expansion; overlook systemic load-bearing capacity. The result is an ecosystem with glossy facades and fragile foundations.
The fragility becomes glaring during stress. The latest disruption showed how a single airline’s crew shortfall could paralyse airports across the country. Gate hold-ups, missed international connections, stranded students, medical passengers trapped mid-journey—such scenes are not isolated failures. They signal an ecosystem operating at the edge of tolerance. They reveal what aviation experts have long warned: that India is running a high-density, high-growth civil aviation sector on under-developed institutional musculature.
In the midst of the crisis, another troubling pattern emerged. As flights were cancelled and demand spiked on alternative routes, some airlines engaged in predatory pricing, with domestic tickets crossing Rs 1 lakh even on short-haul sectors. For a country where aviation has been positioned as an accessible middle-class service, such exploi- tative spikes are unacceptable. Price deregulation must not become a licence for opportunistic profitee-ring during system break- downs. The fact that such market behaviour was allowed to persist unchecked underscores a deeper policy vacuum.
The turbulence, therefore, is not merely about one airline’s rostering failure. It exposes what years of institutional weakening, regulatory complacency, and policy over-centralisation have produced: a system without buffers, without redundancy, and without the empowered, independent oversight needed in a sector that deals with human lives daily. Aviation cannot be micro managed through political announcements or bureaucratic firefighting. It requires stable rules, insulated regu- lators, technologically competent oversight, and long- term capability building.
India must confront four uncomfortable truths.
First, the Government’s regulatory apparatus must be strengthened, depoli-ticised, and granted functional autonomy. Aviation safety and operational reliability cannot depend on headline-driven decision-making.
Second, the country must accelerate the localisation of MRO, software systems, and operational technologies. No large aviation market can sustain itself while importing everything from engines to algorithms.
Third, the financial and institutional health of airlines must be treated as a National economic priority, not an afterthought. Airlines are not mere private companies—they are essential infrastructure.
Fourth, crisis-time predatory pricing must be addressed through transparent, rules-based interven- tion. Market freedom must not come at the cost of public trust.
India’s civil aviation success story is often told through three metrics: passenger growth, airport expansion, and airline orders. But true aviation success is measured in operational resilience, regula- tory foresight, indigenous capability, and public-interest orientation.
The recent fiasco is not an aberration. It is a warning. The question is whether India will treat it as an inconvenience to be forgotten—or a signal to rebuild the institutional spine of a sector that too many people now depend on, and too few truly understand.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]