The Regulator That Let India's Skies Turn Deadly: A Six-Year Chronicle of DGCA's Failures

The recent Ahmedabad AI-171 crash was not a bolt from the blue. The crash of the Air India aircraft that killed 280 people, including crew members, was waiting to happen.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

It was the grim culmination of warnings the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) itself had recorded year after year—and then did nothing about.

Between 2018 and 2023, the DGCA published six consecutive surveillance reports, each more alarming than the last. They were not private memos. They were official, public documents—uploaded to the regulator's own website. And they laid bare a picture of mounting decay across India's airlines, airports, training academies, and maintenance units.

These reports show a civil aviation regulator witnessing—and tolerating—the normalization of falsification, decay, corner-cutting, and defiance of basic aviation norms. Despite these shocking disclosures, no airline was publicly named. No penalty was announced. No systemic enforcement followed. And after 2023, the DGCA simply stopped publishing safety audits.

The Sunday Guardian went through these documents, and what follows is a chronicle of those six years—a record of how India's civil aviation safety net was allowed to rot in plain sight. The newspaper reached out to the DGCA for a response. None was shared.

In 2018, inspectors found that "maintenance inspection has been carried out on Airbus A230-271N (PW1127G-JM engines) aircraft at Airport Line stations without obtaining specific approval." Aircraft were operating with "installed propellers without proper release certificate i.e. CA-Form1."