When an aircraft crashes in India, the response follows a familiar script. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) grounds aircraft, suspends licences, orders audits and acts against the operator. Months or years later, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) publishes its final report. And all too often, that report says the regulator itself had failed.
AAIB has published final reports on 54 accidents that occurred between 2018 and 2025. In 28 of them, AAIB’s own report documents a failing by DGCA: an approval that should not have been granted, an audit that missed what was in plain sight, a rule that was missing or vague, or a finding closed on paper and left open on the ground. Those 28 accidents killed 69 people and seriously injured 99. These are not activists’ allegations. They are the findings of India’s own accident investigator.
Consider Kozhikode. On 7 August 2020, Air India Express flight 1344 overran a tabletop runway; 21 people died, and 76 were seriously injured. AAIB found that DGCA had been “accepting low DFDR monitoring figures” and that safety audits were “closed without any follow-up action”.
It found that a DGCA audit in April 2019, which rated the airport’s fire crew familiarisation as “Satisfactory”, was “factually incorrect and misleading”. It also noted that recommendations made after the Mangalore crash of 2010, another tabletop-runway overrun that killed 158 people, “have not been addressed for the last 10 years”.
Consider Kedarnath. In October 2022, a helicopter crashed at Garud Chatti, killing seven people.
AAIB found the rules for the Kedarnath helipad “vague and not conducive for safe operations”. In April 2023, a man was killed at the helipad itself; AAIB again found the provision “not conducive for safe operations”. In June 2025, another helicopter went down near Gaurikund, killing seven more. AAIB’s report on that crash notes that “some of the issues raised by AAIB in their report were not addressed” in DGCA’s revised circular. Fifteen people died on one pilgrimage route while the warnings sat on file.
Consider Sultanpur in Telangana, where a trainer crashed in October 2019, killing two people. Three months earlier, DGCA had audited the school and found nothing wrong; after the crash, it audited it again. AAIB’s verdict: “the purpose of this audit was not proactive but rather was to restart the flying activities of the FTO at the earliest”.
At Dhanbad in 2023, AAIB found that “the DGCA never carried out any safety oversight” of the glider school at all.
AAIB’s final reports for this period, on accidents and serious incidents alike, contain 606 safety recommendations. Of these, 259 are addressed to DGCA. AAIB’s own published procedure requires DGCA to reply within 90 days and AAIB to assess whether the reply is adequate.
Not one of those replies, and not one of those assessments, has been made public.
In 11 of the reports, AAIB records that earlier recommendations had still not been implemented.
After a trainer accident at Guna in 2024, AAIB recalled asking DGCA to mandate the recording of radio calls between aircraft and air traffic control: “the same recommendation is still pending”.
In 2020, I asked AAIB under the Right to Information Act what action had followed its findings against DGCA in two fatal accidents. The reply, in both cases, was four words: “Matter pertains to DGCA.”
The investigator finds that the regulator failed and hands the finding to the regulator. The regulator decides what, if anything, to do about its own failure. Nobody else checks. When pilots, engineers or airline managers fail, DGCA acts against them, as it should: within days of the Air India crash at Ahmedabad in June 2025, it ordered the airline to remove three officials from crew-scheduling roles. When DGCA fails, we could find no public record of action against any of its officials for the failings documented in these 28 accidents.
Parliament’s transport committee reported that DGCA’s own inspectors raised 4,692 safety findings between January and April 2025; by April, 3,747 were still open, 37 of them classed as an immediate danger. Of DGCA’s 1,630 sanctioned posts, 787 are vacant. A regulator that cannot staff itself cannot close what it finds, and hazards left open come back as accidents.
The investigator is stretched, too.
The Kozhikode report asked AAIB to build a cadre of permanent, full-time investigators, with aviation-medicine and human-factors expertise of its own, and a fully equipped flight-recorder laboratory. In August 2025, the government told Parliament that those recommendations had been implemented. AAIB’s preliminary report on AI171, issued a month earlier, suggests otherwise. Three officers were drawn from DGCA’s Air Safety Directorate for site work, although DGCA’s oversight of Air India falls within the inquiry’s scope. Specialists in aviation medicine, aviation psychology and flight recorders were “taken on board as Subject Matter Experts”, rather than serving as AAIB’s own investigators.
The forward recorder could be read only after the US National Transportation Safety Board supplied a “golden chassis” and download cables. The final report on AI171 is still awaited. But a recommendation declared “implemented” is not yet a capability.
Safety management is a simple loop: identify the hazard, assign an owner, fix it and verify the fix. In India, the loop breaks at DGCA.
Four decisions, none requiring a new law, would close it. First, every AAIB finding against DGCA should receive a public reply from the Ministry of Civil Aviation within 90 days, stating who was responsible and what was done. Second, an independent panel reporting to Parliament should verify whether each failing has been fixed; Parliament’s transport committee called for an independent safety review in March 2026.
Third, AAIB should publish every recommendation, DGCA’s response and its implementation status, as Section 4 of the RTI Act already expects. Fourth, DGCA staff should not investigate accidents in which DGCA’s own role is in question, and AAIB must have permanent investigators of its own.
Safety improves when hazards have owners. Today, the hazards AAIB identifies in the regulator have no owners. Until someone is made answerable for closing them, the reports will keep describing the same failures, in new accidents, with new names.
Capt. Amit Singh FRAeS is the founder and director of Safety Matters Foundation; Views presented are personal.