DGCA Complain to Scindia over DGCA's decision to suspend pilot's licence in Air India peeing incident
New Delhi/IBNS: The Federation of Indian Pilots on Wednesday approached Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, alleging Directorate General of Civil Aviation using its power indiscriminately in cancelling the licence of pilots, media reports said.
The complaint comes after the DGCA suspended for three months the pilot of the Air India New York-New Delhi flight where Shankar Mishra urinated on an elderly woman in a drunken state.
DGCA's reaction is knee-jerk, triggered by sensational media reports, the pilot's body said in a letter to Scindia, an HT report said.
The body questioned why DGCA had not conducted its own independent inquiry into the incident.
"The basic principle of assuming the pilot's innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt appears to have been ignored by the DGCA," the pilots' body wrote, it added.
The body alleged that the pilot was punished while the accountable manager of the same organisation has been allowed to go without any punishment.
"Pilots may, henceforth, not hesitate to exercise their statutory authority to restrain and deplane passengers of file FIRs at even the slightest pretext for fear of being reprimanded by the DGCA and of being accused of not performing their duties in accordance with unruly passenger-related regulations," the letter said.
"This is definitely not the type of work environment warranted in a customer-centric and service-oriented industry," it added.
DGCA slapped a Rs 30 lakh fine on Air India for mishandling the incident and imposed a separate fine of Rs 3 lakh on Air India's director of in-flight services in connection with the Shankar Mishra case.
Further, the aviation regulator imposed another fine on Air India for the second urination incident on a Paris-New Delhi flight, media reports said.
Several unions as well as Air India have flagged the grounding of the pilot as an excess.
The Tata group-owned carrier has assured support to the pilot in his appeal against the licence cancellation.
A joint forum of six unions on Tuesday appealed to DGCA to revoke the suspension of the licence, said the report.
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