What three incidents say about Indian aviation safety

Safety is not a gadget, but a state of mind-Eleanor Everet

Indian aviation is expanding faster than almost any other major market: large fleet orders, rising passenger volumes, and a wider regional network. That growth has also exposed coordination gaps.

Three recent events — an immigration lapse at Delhi, a drug-test failure after a mid-air upset, and a cockpit attack on a foreign carrier — do not prove systemic collapse. They do show where procedure, screening and oversight are lagging the traffic.

The flashpoint:

On 4 September, three Italian nationals arrived at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport from Amritsar on Air India flight AI1115 at about 12:50 am. They held domestic boarding passes and, under the hub-and-spoke procedure, were required to exit through a designated gate, complete departure immigration, and then join Lufthansa flight LH763 to Munich.

Instead, they were escorted into the international-to-international transfer area and boarded the Munich flight at about 1:45 am without immigration clearance. The Ministry of Civil Aviation issued a show-cause notice to Air India; the civil aviation minister later said the escorting staff had been suspended. The Home Ministry also ordered a probe. This was not an international transit connection. It was a domestic-to-international transfer failure.

Separately, Air India terminated the pilot-in-command of its 4 August Phuket–Delhi flight after a confirmatory test for a psychoactive substance, reported as marijuana. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau’s preliminary report described a brief, near-simultaneous failure of all three hydraulic systems on Airbus A320 VT-EXO, an autopilot disconnect, a short stall warning and an altitude loss of about 300 feet, with 24 people injured. The bureau called the positive test a serious concern and asked the Directorate General of Civil Aviation to act. It did not identify drug use as the cause of the upset.

The third case sits outside Indian operations. On 30 September, Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, was attacked and reportedly stabbed by the co-pilot on Flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. He said that he opened the cockpit door from the floor so others could intervene as the aircraft plunged. Israeli officials described an attempt to crash the jet; the motive remains under investigation. The episode is a reminder of flight-deck threat, not evidence of a lapse at an Indian airline or airport.

Where the system is thin:

Ground security, run by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) with airlines and airport operators, is built mainly against external threats. The Delhi case points to a softer point: passenger segregation when a domestic arrival becomes an international departure. Boarding-pass codes, escort routes and immigration counters must work as one chain. Here they did not.

Crew screening is uneven. Pre-flight breath-analyser tests for alcohol are mandatory for flight and cabin crew. Testing for other psychoactive substances is far less routine and is often triggered after an event rather than before one. Fatigue rules exist on paper; peak schedules test whether Flight Duty Time Limitations are kept.

Airworthiness is relative strength. The ministry told the Parliament in 2025 that more than half of India’s 800-plus aircraft were under five years old, and that aircraft older than 15 years were about 13 percent of the fleet. IndiGo’s average age is under five years; Air India’s fleet is older. Young aircraft do not remove pressure on air traffic control, slots, or domestic maintenance capacity.

Scanners are still on trial:

Indian checkpoints still rely on walk-through metal detectors and pat downs. Millimetre-wave body scanners, standard at many foreign hubs, can flag non-metallic items and use automated target recognition to mark anomalies on a generic avatar rather than a body image.

The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security began trials in May 2026 at Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kochi, and has mandated machines at eight airports, with some already delivered. Algorithms are still being tuned for Indian conditions. For most passengers, frisking remains the norm. Faster deployment would close a known gap; it would not have stopped the Delhi immigration failure, which was a routing error, not a missed pat-down.

What should change:

Regulators and operators can act on the failures already documented. Biometric or boarding-pass checks should make it physically difficult for a domestic arrival to enter an international transfer corridor without immigration clearance, including under the DigiYatra framework. Pre-flight testing should extend, on a random but regular basis, beyond alcohol to other psychoactive substances, with mental-health support that does not punish disclosure.

Duty-time limits need enforcement, not only publication. Body-scanner trials should move to timed rollout at the mandated airports. And the DGCA’s technical audit strength should rise with the fleet and the route map.

Indian aviation’s daily volume is large, and these cases do not by themselves establish a failing safety record. They do show operational friction: commercial expansion moving faster than transfer discipline, crew screening and checkpoint technology. The correction is procedural certainty, not a new slogan.

(The writer is a former Officer on Special Duty to the Union Minister of Civil Aviation)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nomula Srinivas Rao

Nomula Srinivas Rao