[Omkar]

Recently, Air India planned to hire foreign pilots to meet its requirements on the Boeing 777 fleet through a placement firm and these pilots are being offered better pay, lucrative terms and generous benefits.

Denying that there is a shortage of pilots in India, the government, however, admitted a marginal shortage of commanders on certain types of aircraft and the same is being managed by utilising foreign pilots by issuing Foreign Aircrew Temporary Authorization (FATA).

The government estimates that India requires over 1,000 pilots annually over the next five years but experts think the country lacks the adequate pilot training infrastructure. They say the number of commercial pilot licences issued in recent years is hardly enough to meet the rising demand.

As per the Ministry of civil aviation, a total 744 commercial pilot licences (CPL) were issued during the year 2019 which came down to 578 in the year 2020. However, the number increased further to 862 in the year 2021 and 699 till 30th June, 2022.

In June 2022, the Airport Authority of India awarded contracts for six more flying training organisations (FTO) slots at five airports — Bhavnagar (Gujarat), Hubballi (Karnataka), Kadapa (Andhra Pradesh), Kishangarh (Rajasthan) and Salem (Tamil Nadu). Currently, India has 32 functional FTOs.

Source: The Economic Times

[Amrik Singh]

I hope that the industry doesn't resort to the way Driving Licence are issued. Pay a bribe and driving Licence is delivered at your home.
Hopefully, they get fully trained Pilots selected without reservation policy whereby even a 40% Mark's holder is deemed qualified and gets preference in appointment too.

[Jeroen]

these pilots are being offered better pay, lucrative terms and generous benefits.

That is not unusual. They also tend to be the ones that are being let go, once the local number of pilots goes up over time. Happened in the middle east, Africa and so on.

Also, certainly for western pilots, India is still considered a “hardship country”, so in order to attract them, you will have to offer an attractive package.

Pilot shortage is very much a global issue, just about all countries have the same challenge. The USA and to a lesser degree Europe as well all need thousands and thousands of pilots in the years to come. That will be reflected in packages on offer, promotion changes, subsidies for your flight training etc.



Jeroen

[Capricorn]

And the airlines with OEM support have started thinking single pilot operations to counter supply constraints and reduce costs. In current scenario it is highly unsafe. But I see it as reality for short haul flights in a decade.

Ref: airlines-push-for-lone-pilot-flights-to-cut-costs-despite-safety-fears

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by Capricorn

And the airlines with OEM support have started thinking single pilot operations to counter supply constraints and reduce costs. In current scenario it is highly unsafe. But I see it as reality for short haul flights in a decade.

Ref: airlines-push-for-lone-pilot-flights-to-cut-costs-despite-safety-fears

Actually the air France incident as referenced by the times of India, is a good example how a team of three pilots messes up completely, because they don’t work together. It’s really a poster event to promote single pilot operation.

That single pilot operation will come with a lot more automation. The response from pilots and their unions and some safety experts are identical to the debate about getting rid of the flight engineer and before that the navigator.

Automation takes over. What you can not do is just fly the current pilots with the current processes and rules and regulations. That would be unsafe, although how much more unsafe is a matter of debate.

I fly much smaller planes singlehanded and workload in busy airspace or when faced with unexpected situations can be a bit of a challenge. Even single pilot planes have benefitted from lots of automation. A Cirrus jet, certified for single pilot operation has probably a more advanced cockpit then most commercial jet airliners.

Even so, because so much has to be rethought and re-certified before we can fly commercial jets single handed it is going to take considerable time.

A two person crew is not without its challenges and faults. Automating some of the functions, re-arranging some of the functions and support might well make it overall safer. But many people just don’t like it. Similar to self driving cars, the public at large expects self driving cars to be absolutely perfect, whereas human drivers are not.

Just as a thought, the Cirrus Jet, one pilot operated has an emergency button. Everybody, the pilot or any of the passengers can hit it, if the pilot is or feels uninhibited. The plane will land itself fully automated, once you hit that button, it will, all by itself figure out the most suitable airport, runway, send emergency signal on the radio and land the planes, until it comes to a complete stop on the runway!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiGkzgfR_c0

Automation rules! And is a major factor in the incredible safety record of the aviation industry.

Jeroen

[Capricorn]

Fully agree. It's matter of time automation is put in by OEMs in commercial aeroplanes that take care of take off, landing, dialogue with ATC (signals and codes over english maybe), 1000 many sensors and AI for conditions and actions. It is complex but is perfect receipe for automation.

The primary (later only) pilot will be cockpitting commercial planes for the prace of mind.

Don't go by the ToI news contents. It is baised against automation. They have raised voice againt lost pilot jobs that anyway is going to remain steady but the number of flights will increase.

Didn't it happen in metro trains? Riders were not aware the train is fully automated but driver didn't do anything for months. Now with that high confidence it rides without drivers. That is what automation does, increase accuracy and efficiency.

[V.Narayan]

Where civil passenger airliners go I suspect the day we see single pilot operations as normal or single engine airliners as normal is very very far off. Passenger sentiment and perceptions of safety will dominate. An airliner flying in a crowded air space cannot be compared to a metro train running on a uni-directional track - chalk and cheese. Crowded air spaces, weather uncertainty, wind shear, - there are so many variables. Combine that with the fact that an air crash is a guarantee of fatalities. More automation is needed so that a two pilot crew can cope with tomorrows even more crowded skies.

There are so many instances in a cockpit where you need two pairs of eyes and four hands not to mention two cool minds.

Why would you cut out the second pilot when his/her cost is a fraction of the total flight cost. In India per sector cost of the second pilot is around Rs 8000 to 10,000 {including on going training costs} on say an Airbus carrying 180 pax generating revenues of ball park Rs 1.5 million per sector. You don't have to do something simply because it can be automated. Automation is a tool and not an end in itself.

Coming back to the topic - there is no doubt we have a short supply of pilots in India. Some of the pathetic corruption of the past is hopefully behind us but as always with a regulated industry the Govt moved too slow on encouraging setting up of high quality flying schools.

[fhdowntheline]

Automation rules, but only to an extent. With hundreds of lives at stake, you cannot depend on one pilot alone. I also don't understand why govt authorities should be in denial of the shortage issue. Commercial aviation is a focus area for them. If anything they should improve training infrastructure with better governance for training institutes, facilitating for lesser cost of trainer planes and simulators.

[Air_Kerala]

A Commercial Pilot License (CPL) is where every pilot starts his journey and is usually where they start diverging as they progress through their careers. Unlike a driving license, with the appropriate category mentioned on it, legally, you can drive any car, be that a three cylinder Maruthi Alto all the way upto a ten cylinder Lamborghini Huracán STO, the only thing stopping you is common sense and the desire to not end up on the internet as part of the supercar owner fails compilations, but you cannot do the same with a CPL.

To fly a passenger jet/propeller aircraft, you need to be further trained on a specific type of aircraft, this could be an Airbus, a Boeing, an Embraer or even a COMAC. This training includes ground classes, exams on the systems and ops procedures. Post ground session, simulator sessions are conducted on full flight (FFS) level D simulators where normal, abnormal and emergency situations are conducted. Once you finish this phase, your instructor signs you off and you go for your check with a Designated Examiner, who conducts two checks in India, a check during day and one at night. Upon clearing both, you are Type Rated on the particular aircraft and you are cleared for your base check and line training, but you still can't fly passengers.

Before your base check, you do three more sessions of FFS sessions, two observation sessions and one Zero Flight Time (ZFTT) session. A base check involves taking an empty aircraft that you are type rated on and along with an instructor, you perform six takeoffs and six landings. This would be the first time you will be flying the actual aircraft, albeit empty with just you, your fellow trainees and the training captain. Line training starts with you occupying the jump seat, the third seat in the cockpit, where you act as a supernumerary crew, observe the operating crew for a defined number of sectors. Post this
you occupy the right seat (First Officer's seat) and commence line training, occupying the left seat (Captain's Seat) would be a training captain and on the third seat would be a safety pilot, who steps in if trainee is not performing upto the standards or the trainer believes there is a potential safety risk.

At my airline, a trainee undergoes one hundred hours of line training and the end is cleared for another check, post completion of which he is cleared to fly on the line. Again, company policy dictates that we need to have minimum cockpit experience per flight and since the junior pilots barely have any hours on type, the captain contributes most towards meeting this requirement, hence initially for the first six to nine months, they fly with the senior most captains in the company. This also makes them ineligible to fly in winters as they do not meet the minimum requirements to operate in low visibility conditions, so during winters, they don't fly a lot.

To sum it up, when the airline hires an ab-initio first officer to getting him released to the point of meeting the minimum cockpit experience, it takes about 12-14 month of intense training, all the simulator sessions, an empty jet designed to carry 180 people carrying 4 people and doing circuits and landings, flying with a training captain who are paid more than a line captain, insufficient crew utilisation as they need a senior captain to fly with or need flying conditions that are above their minima, which is usually never the case when winter sets in the country, all this for one trainee first officer. When you scale this upto 400 trainees, that is a massive investment.

Now at the end of this long and arduous journey, let's say your airline becomes insolvent and you are hired by another airline which operates a different type of aircraft, you start from scratch. It may seat the same number of pax, it may have the same number of engines but you cannot fly this aircraft unless you are Type Rated on it.

When the newspapers talk of pilot shortage or abundance, they paint an ab-initio CPL holder with no Type Rating and a Type Rated First Officer with one thousand hours on type with the same brush, which is them diluting it down for the masses. There will always be demand for experienced crew, in times of severe shortage, experienced pilots are given joining bonuses, careers progression is fast tracked and overtime allowances are hiked. On the contrary, when economic conditions are bad, none of the incentives will be there, but openings will be there. Pilots try and remain with the same company, because seniority matters a whole lot in our industry and they will only give up seniority when the incentive is promising enough.

[Air_Kerala]

Didn't it happen in metro trains? Riders were not aware the train is fully automated but driver didn't do anything for months. Now with that high confidence it rides without drivers. That is what automation does, increase accuracy and efficiency.

Up in the skies, we use the proverbial highways to fly between destinations. These are called airways and are numbered alpha numerically, eg. Q1 connects DEL BOM, Q21 and Q23 connects BLR DEL. With a combination of airways and waypoints, we are able to fly anywhere on the globe. On an airway, each aircraft is separated by the succeeding aircraft by a certain distance in NM, or a time difference or an altitude, ATC may use them individually or a combination of all three to maintain separation between aircraft's. Each airway has a designated width, usually 10 NM either side of the centreline. Anytime you need to deviate for more than 10NM, you need to ask ATC's permission.

As a country situated in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, we receive some pretty intense weather. Abundance of moisture and heat ensure weather systems are massive, both vertically and laterally. If we cannot clear the weather vertically, we have to fly around it. Some of these weather systems extend for more than 300 NM laterally and upto 45000' vertically, far above the vertical limit of most commercial passenger aircraft, your only option then is to circumnavigate this weather system.

Now you are not the only plane in that airspace encountering weather, there are possibly hundred's of planes that would need weather deviations in that same airspace, by deviating more, you are now crossing another airway or even entering another Air traffic region, which may have a converging traffic, the heading that you ask to fly may take you into a prohibited airspace, like Rastrapathi Bhavan, which you can never overfly under any circumstances. We have hundreds of such restrictive airspace's across the country. This causes a cascading effect on the adjacent airspace and the aircraft's in that airspace.

All of this is extremely taxing but still doable when we are flying over mainland India and during daytime, as our primary source of communication, which is VHF has exceptional coverage and we can look outside the flight deck window and visually fly around the weather. Now imagine, you are overflying the Bay of Bengal, at night, with severe weather and you are unable to establish VHF contact, you are trying to request a deviation on HF radio, but are unable to get through, you will have to resort to a procedure called an RVSM Contingency procedure to avoid weather, a part of which involves transmitting blindly on the international air-to-air frequency your intentions, warning aircraft's near you that you are deviating, praying that the aircraft around you is monitoring their frequency, as they may also be busy deviating.

Understanding the weather radar returns in itself takes a long time. In fact some of the best pilots I have seen are really good at understanding the weather radar returns, but they themselves would not claim to have mastered the art. Sure the manual gives you all the information, but there is so much more to it, like the time of day you fly in, the latitude at which you are flying, the terrain over which you are flying, the time of year.

The challenges are compounded when you overfly different nations with extremely accented ATC's, overflying significant terrain, as in the back of our mind, we need to keep a plan ready to fly a designated escape route in case of a decompression scenario.

Sometimes you may just not be able use the airspace, even if it is completely clear of weather, because of geo political tensions, something we experienced with our neighbouring nation in the aftermath of the Pathankot incident.

Any of the aforementioned scenarios may play out individually or in any number of combinations. In such times, it is the experience and ingenuity of the flight deck crew that sees them through the day. You may not get the desired altitude or the heading you want, for any number of reasons. You will have work with what you have, you will have to coordinate with the other aircraft's, the ATC, work the weather radar, find a path through the weather, coordinate again. You may do it once during normal ops. but during pre monsoon, you may have to do this for the entire duration of your flight as your departure airport, your route and your destination may be packed with weather.

This is just weather, there could be medical emergencies, or a passenger going into labour or suffering from extreme gastric pain which could be misdiagnosed for a something else, a mechanical failure. The decision to divert, whether now or later, whether to an airport really close by but with a short runway and marginal weather needs to be taken by the captain within the next 90 seconds or we may loose a life. I believe this ability to take cognisance of your training, your experience and work as a team under duress, this human ability is what AI or automation lacks and why human beings are still in charge inside the flight deck. Maybe some day in the future, we may succeed, but not today.

Automation is amazing, it does so much of the mundane tasks, that it leaves with a calm mind to analyse and take a call when something starts drifting from the normal. It gives me the space to keep a plan B, C and if needed a D, if things don't pan out.

And surely sir, it is a wee bit more challenging than ferrying passengers from Rajiv Chowk to Kashmere Gate. Peace

[fhdowntheline]

Originally Posted by Air_Kerala

To fly a passenger jet/propeller aircraft, you need to be further trained on a specific type of aircraft, this could be an Airbus, a Boeing, an Embraer or even a COMAC.

This is a bit OT, but since you mentioned, would you be confident of flying a COMAC jet if you ever get a chance?

[Air_Kerala]

Originally Posted by fhdowntheline

This is a bit OT, but since you mentioned, would you be confident of flying a COMAC jet if you ever get a chance?

If it needs to fly outside China, it needs to be certified by FAA and EASA. After the B737 MAX debacle, they will go through it with a fine tooth comb before they stamp it with their seal of approval. Post that, safety and thereby the confidence to fly a plane comes down to the airline, its safety culture and adherence to SOP’s and maintenance schedule. If IndiGo, Vistara or Air India induct it in their fleet, sure .From a career perspective, may be no sir. Always makes sense to be typed and current on a fleet that is in abundance in your theatre of operation. But the COMAC would be fun a addition to the logbook