Air India Express, the budget subsidiary of Air India, has been accused of falsifying safety records to the Indian civil aviation authority months before before a deadly Boeing 787 crash killed over 200 people. The airline was supposed to update certain components on CFM International LEAP-1A engines found on Airbus A320neo planes by a specified date. According to the information Air India Express submitted to the government, they did make these repairs by the date. Only problem is, that information is fake.
“In order to show that the work has been carried out within the prescribed limits, the AMOS records have apparently been altered/forged,” said the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in a memo sent privately to the airline, later acquired by Reuters. This was all the way back in March, meaning that the Indian government knew that there were lax safety standards — and more than that, outright safety fraud — going on at Air India months before the tragic Boeing 787 crash in June. For its part, Air India Express claimed that the erroneous information was due “the migration of records,” which sounds a bit like a fifth-grader explaining what happened to his homework. Pay no attention to the fact that it immediately fired its quality manager and suspended its deputy continuing airworthiness manager, which surely is entirely unrelated to record migration.
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Medical Records Are Getting Faked, Too
The tragic crash of Air India flight 171 – Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
An airline faking its safety records is very bad. Know what’s also very bad? Pilots faking their medical records. According to Business Today, a number of pilots in India have been doing exactly that. This came to a head in April, when an Air India Express pilot — in his 30s, no less — died of a heart attack right after landing his plane, per Air Insight. That’s a tragedy, but also a near miss, since he just as easily could have died mid-flight. He was later found to have had an underlying heart condition, which was not caught by any of his medical examinations. Were they faked, or were the standards too lax, or did the doctors screw up?
With the eyes of the world watching after the 787 crash, the DGCA is cracking down. Civilian pilots now have to go through medical exams at Indian Air Force bases, which are pretty strict. That opens up its own problems, since the country’s civilian sector is already going through a severe pilot shortage. Still, better a pilot shortage than falling planes.
Clearly, Air India is a mess right now. Nearly half of all safety violations (that the Indian government caught, at least) in 2024 came from the airline and its Express subsidiary, per Reuters. When the private sector Tata Group took possession of the Air India from the government in 2022, its stated goal was to make it a “world class airline.” From the looks of things, that’s going to take a pretty major overhaul at this point.
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