The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Friday ordered removal of Air India flight safety chief A. S. Soman after it was found that the government-owned airline did not maintain proper flight monitoring data, according to sources.
Mr. Soman was appointed Air India’s air safety chief in January this year.
Flight safety heads are appointed by airlines with approval from DGCA.
The move comes after investigation into an incident involving an Air India flight over a month ago. On June 28, a flight from Bengaluru to Hyderabad had a bad landing and the regulator found that the airline could not retrieve the flight data.
The DGCA issued a show cause notice to Mr. Soman, and Air India suspended an aircraft maintenance engineer over the incident.
‘No satisfactory reply’ In its investigation, the regulator found that there was a lapse in data maintenance. Mr. Soman did not give a satisfactory reply and blamed the engineering department, a DGCA official said.
DGCA guidelines mandate a 100 per cent monitoring of all flight data, under what is called “Flight Operations Quality Assurance”, a process which extracts flight data to boost safety. In case of any incident, an analysis of flight data allows safety managers to look at the causes for such incidents and helps them improve operational procedures, which will help tackle safety issues.
