India’s $13.9 billion aviation industry—projected to cater to over 300 million domestically by 2030—is a ticking time bomb.
This July, in the sweltering heat at the Delhi High Court, additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati announced that new rules on pilot duty and rest periods would not be implemented this year after all. Introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in January, the rules were designed specifically to combat pilot fatigue. They were set to take effect in June, but were abruptly retracted. The hearing addressed a writ petition filed by the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), seeking clarity on when the new norms would be enforced. The DGCA’s response followed its request to airline companies in April for a tentative implementation timeline.
Concerns over pilot fatigue had been mounting in the months leading up to the announcement of the new Flight Duty Period, Flight Time Limitations, and Prescribed Rest Periods by the DGCA. The urgency deepened in November 2023 when a 37-year-old Air India pilot, Captain Himanil Kumar, collapsed at Delhi Airport while training to fly the airline’s Boeing 777 fleet, and later died at the hospital. Kumar was the second Indian pilot to die on duty within three months; in August, Captain Manoj Subramanyam, a 40-year-old IndiGo pilot, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest just minutes before his flight from Nagpur.
These back-to-back tragedies raised alarm in the industry. “Another young Indian pilot passed away today due to a suspected cardiac event,” reportedly tweeted Captain Shakti Lumba, a retired IndiGo VP who is now the president of the Professional Pilots Society in India (His tweet was since deleted.) “If this doesn’t convince the DGCA, civil aviation ministry, and airlines to urgently address the stress, fatigue, and anxiety among pilots, nothing will.”
The DGCA, India’s aviation watchdog, regulates the country’s Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL). At 13 hours of flight duty time, India’s FDTL is already demanding, but after the pandemic slowdown, increased route expansion and pilot shortages have forced many to fly beyond the recommended maximum of 60 hours a week, exacerbating crew exhaustion. The DGCA finally responded to the growing crisis by revising FDTL norms in January 2024.
The new guidelines increased weekly rest periods from 36 to 48 hours and introduced quarterly fatigue reports. Its scheduled implementation on June 1, 2024, was pushed back due to pressure from operators. An airline CEO, speaking anonymously to the Economic Times in January, claimed the proposed regulations would require a 20 percent increase in pilot numbers, which would escalate expenses and lead to huge numbers of flight cancellations. Still, the DGCA held firm on the FDTL implementation deadline till early March. By the end of the month, however, it appeared to have yielded to influence from the airline lobby. A notice on the regulator’s website announced the deadline had been deferred, without providing a reason or setting a new date.
The pilot fatigue problem isn’t unique to India. In January, two pilots for Indonesia-based Batik Air fell asleep for 28 minutes mid-flight, causing their plane to veer off course between Sulawesi and Jakarta. In April, unionized Virgin Atlantic pilots in the UK voted 96 percent in favor of pursuing an industrial action in response to rising fatigue. Earlier, the CEO of Wizz Air UK faced a backlash for urging crew members to push through their fatigue to avoid flight cancellations. In May, senior pilots at Virgin Australia raised safety concerns, claiming rostering systems were pushing them “to the limits.”
But in India, the belief that overwork and fatigue are not just acceptable but essential has become entrenched across industries. The aviation crisis is just the tip of the iceberg; it is the tech industry that is leading the charge. Last year, Infosys cofounder Narayana Murthy suggested that Indian youth should work 70 hours a week for the nation’s development. Murthy’s advice came up at the Indian Parliament on the first day of its winter session and found support from a list of influential Indian tech leaders, including Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of India’s first AI unicorn, Ola Krutrim; Ayushmaan Kapoor, cofounder of the AI-powered customer platform Xeno; and even veterans like Sajjan Jindal, CEO and MD of JSW Group, and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems. Almost all of them justified the extended work hours, which far exceed the maximum eight to nine hours per day stipulated by the International Labour Organisation and the Indian Labour Code, as necessary for strengthening India’s economy. “We have to make India an economic superpower that we can all be proud of,” Jindal wrote on X. He cited Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, “who works 14-16 hours everyday,”as a model. In July this year, the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employee Union said the state government had plans to increase working hours in the sector from the current maximum of 10 hours (including overtime) to a staggering 14 hours a day. As the union planned massive campaigns to oppose the move, the labor minister stated that the push for the proposal had come from the companies.
The airline companies think they have a solution to the fatigue crisis: technology. IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced it would be an “early adopter” of a wrist-worn fatigue-monitoring device it was developing with French defense and aerospace company Thales Group. The device can provide “detailed insights into demographic data, including routes, pairings, crew profiles, and more, going beyond traditional scheduling-focused biomathematical models,” the airline stated in a press release in September. The airline, which operates 2,000 flights daily and employs over 5,000 pilots, said the device would be rolled out after a proof-of-concept trial. No date for the rollout was announced.
Wearable activity trackers are not new to the aviation industry. IndiGo’s device sounds similar to Actiwatch, a now-discontinued line of research-grade actigraphs from Philips, used to monitor sleep patterns, study circadian rhythms, and track physical activity as part of an airline’s fatigue risk-management system. But they partly rely on performance tests and subjective measures, such as self-reporting, which often results in being targeted by the airlines, says Captain C. S. Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots. Safety management systems on the whole tend to be neglected by operators and are viewed as an additional expense, says Captain Amit Singh of the NGO Safety Matters Foundation.
In May 2023, Air India launched safety management software called Coruson, as well as BAM (Boeing Alertness Model), a fatigue-mitigation tool integrated into its rostering system, which is used by airlines to create and manage pilot schedules. Coruson, developed by cloud software company Ideagen, centralizes, analyzes, and reports on safety-related data—such as incidents, hazards, and risk assessments. BAM, developed jointly by Boeing and the software company Jeppesen, predicts and manages pilot fatigue by analyzing flight schedules and performance data. These tools were designed to prevent the creation of fatiguing rosters and pairings, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson noted in an internal message to employees. The carrier also introduced two new digital tools for its crew—the Pilot Sector Report app, to help pilots easily submit information on flight performance, incidents, and observations post-flight; and DocuNet, a digital management system that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and sharing of documents (such as flight manuals, training records, and compliance documents).
Despite these measures, the airline was fined by the DGCA in March this year for violating FDTL limits and fatigue management rules. This May, Air India Express cabin staff called in sick en masse to protest against “mismanagement.” This followed a similar protest from the crew, mostly pilots, at Vistara airlines. Both Air India and Vistara are now owned by one of India’s largest conglomerates, the Tata Group, which took over the former from the Indian government in January 2022.
Twenty-five of those who called in sick at Air India Express were terminated. Others were reportedly served an ultimatum. Those sacked were later reinstated by the airline following an intervention by the chief labour commissioner. Nearly a week before, the regional labor commissioner of Delhi had allegedly written to the Tata group chairman pointing to “blatant violations of labour laws” and insisting the legitimate concerns of the cabin crew be looked into. According to CNBC, Vistara employees said the agitation at their end had to do with recent salary updates, which fixed pilot pay at 40 flight hours—down from 70. Protesting first officers claimed that the new salary structure would result in an almost 57 percent pay cut. Under the new terms they would also have to fly up to 76 hours to earn what they were previously earning at 70 hours.
To placate the pilots and get them back to work, management had assured them that salaries for the “extra working hours” would be credited once Vistara was integrated with Air India. At the time, two Air India pilots unions had written to the chairman of the company, saying that such issues were not isolated but systemic. Burnout was the other related issue, with many pilots complaining of inadequate rest and being pushed to their limits.
Captain Singh, a former senior manager at AirAsia, tells WIRED that such effects significantly increase the risk of accidents, but also adversely affect pilot health in the long run. Tail swaps—rushing between different types of aircraft to take off immediately after disembarking from another—have become more prevalent under the 13-hour rules, and can further contribute to exhaustion, as do hasty acclimatization and, most significantly, landing three, four, or more flights consecutively, which Captain Randhawa described as a “severe energy management challenge.”
In the 2024 “Safety Culture Survey” conducted by Singh’s Safety Matters Foundation in July, 81 percent of 530 respondents, primarily medium- to short-haul pilots, stated that bufferless rosters contribute to their fatigue. As many as 84 percent indicated concerns with the speed and direction of shift rotation. “That’s the problem with the new rostering softwares the operators are introducing,” a pilot from a private airline, who requested anonymity, says. “They’re optimizers designed to make pilots work every second of their 13-hour schedule, leaving no breathing room.” The buffer-deficient timetables push pilots to their limits, so any additional pressure—like unpredictable weather—can easily overwhelm them.
Solving this issue with wrist-worn fatigue-measuring devices is contentious. But that isn’t the only problem. A year since they were hyped up, the buzz around fatigue-management tech has all but fizzled out. There have been no updates from IndiGo about the wrist device. Neither IndiGo nor the Thales Group responded to requests to comment.
Source : Wired
