Jaipur: The Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Monday arrested two SpiceJet pilots for “fraudulently obtaining commercial pilot licences (CPL) from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)”.
Three JetLite and Jet Airways pilots would soon be arrested on same charges. The agency had earlier arrested Rahul Yadav who had flown 1,000 hours for Indian Airlines.
DGCA recently suspended licences of seven pilots and two flying school instructors — including Nidhi Vashishtha, Rahul Yadav, Malini MR, Priya Sharma, Rakesh Mehta, Pallavi Hemant, Shaheed Maliq, Mahaveer Singh Beniwal and Mohindar Kumar — in this connection.
IG, ACB, Umesh Mishra said SpiceJet’s captain Anuj Kumar Chaudhary and co-pilot Amit Mundra —both working in Delhi — were arrested in Jaipur on Monday.
ASP Bhupendra Yadav, investigating officer, said police have issued notices to JetLite and Jet Airways seeking details of three other pilots including Rajesh Mirani, Nitin Jain and Sanjeev Gupta.
Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau arrests two pilots for fake licences
Scan on flight schools
New Delhi: The aviation regulator is considering “looking into” 10,000 commercial pilot licences and will conduct a third-party audit of flying schools after six cases of licence fraud were detected among pilots.
The directorate-general of civil aviation (DGCA) has planned the steps as the licence forgery cases have given rise to fears that incompetent pilots are endangering travellers’ lives.
The regulator is also worried that a large number of Indian youth nowadays go abroad for training to become pilots and return with fake or invalid licences.
Besides the six cases of forgery, “we have got some more suspicious cases but there is nothing confirmed as yet and investigations are going on”, DGCA chief E.K. Bharat Bhushan said.
Two pilots of IndiGo and two of SpiceJet were found to have used forged mark sheets to get licences. An Air India pilot and one from MDLR are also being probed for similar offences.
All the 4,000-odd holders of airline transport pilot licences are being probed and the DGCA is “considering looking into all the commercial pilot licence holders,” he said. There are over 10,000 such licence holders in the country.
Fake pilots’ may have been conned themselves
New Delhi: Fake commanders who fudged marksheets to get to the captain’s seat may have been conned themselves. Here’s how: co-pilots failing the exam to become commanders are routinely approached by touts with the promise of having their papers “re-evaluated” for the pass mark required.
And with the DGCA exam database being inaccessible to even its head office, verification is not possible at the time of submission.
Pilots cough up between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 7 lakh (sometimes as a bank draft) for a package deal — real marksheets with no reds and a Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) licence for commandership. But what the commanders do not realize is that the middlemen may after all be handing them fake marksheets that will show up when checked with the original database.
The double-con came to light when top aviation officials began probing licences on the directive of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation after a woman pilot repeatedly landing on the nosewheel was found to have forged a marksheet. “A number of industry people have told us middlemen involved in this racket ask the co-pilots to fill up forms for re-evaluation and even take bank drafts to make it look real,” said an official connected with the probe. “They are learnt to ask for Rs 5-7 lakh for this task and then (for) getting a licence issued. Co-pilots see this as a foolproof way of doing an illegal thing.”
But what pushes co-pilots to acquire an airline transport pilot licence (ATPL) by fraudulent means, paying a huge “fee” to boot? “By the time a co-pilot is eligible to become commander in terms of number of hours flown, his or her monthly salary is about Rs 2 lakh,” said an official.
“On becoming commander, the salary doubles to Rs 4 lakh. If someone is not able to pass the ATPL exam, the monetary loss is a whopping Rs 24 lakh annually. So it makes economic sense for such people to pay Rs 5-7 lakh and become a commander as the cost will be recovered in just four months.”
14/03/11 Saurabh Sinha/Times of India
