New Delhi: Air India pilot unions on Tuesday demanded the replacement of Director General of Civil Aviation Arun Kumar for his "biased, unprofessional premature and presumptive comments" on TV over the Kozhikode plane crash. In a joint letter to Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) and Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) said, "We, therefore, as a body of professional aviators, have lost complete faith and confidence in Mr. Arun Kumar and the demand that he be replaced with immediate effect."
The Air India Express flight carrying 191 passengers on board skidded off the runway in rain and broke apart while landing at Kozhikode on Friday claiming 18 lives including two pilots.
The pilots union have cited to purported statements by Kumar who said the landing was "not smooth and appropriate". "At this juncture, we would also like to point out the futility of routinely appointing career bureaucrats picked from their parent cadre as the head of the Director-General of Civil Aviation," the letter read.
The pilots union stated that in the early days of Civil Aviation in India, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation was headed only by aviation professionals with operational experience. It is only in the recent past that the host has been occupied by bureaucrats and the results are there for all to see.
Pointing out to the examples of 19 heads or administrators of the Federal Aviation Authority of the USA, the union stated that just as the head of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board cannot be a veterinary scientist and nor can the head of Medical Council of India be a mathematician, every technically sensitive department with public safety ramifications requires a domain expert.
"The DGCA of India, therefore, stands out as an aberration and embarrassment before the international aviation community," the letter further read.
