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The crash of an Air India Express jet in May 2010 highlighted the problems smaller airlines are facing. An investigation blamed the Serbian pilot for the disaster in which a Boeing 737 operated by the national carrier's low-cost arm crashed while landing at Mangalore's airport, killing 158 people. The probe found that the pilot slept through more than half the flight and woke up disoriented when it was time to land the aircraft. India's pilot shortage has been driven by fierce demand as a slew of carriers have started up in the past decade and expanded rapidly. Pilots complain that they don't have enough rest time between flights, a violation of international aviation safety practices. Indian airlines have been forced to look abroad for staff, which comes with its own problems as some Eastern European pilots had difficulties with English
-- the international language of aviation. By hiring pilots from countries where English isn't spoken widely, "you have to accept that there's potential for confusion, or less comprehension," said Gideon Ewers, a spokesman for the U.K.-based International Federation of Airline Pilots' Associations. Airlines across Asia have been recruiting foreigners. China has at least 1,300 foreign flight captains, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. Garuda Indonesia and Korean Airlines have also been forced to hire foreign pilots. In China, state media quoted an American pilot for Spring Airways complaining he had to rely on his Chinese first officer to communicate with air traffic controllers who wouldn't or couldn't speak English. Experts say while some smaller airlines are forced to hire pilots on short-term contracts, they don't have as much control over the quality of the pilot's training and experience as big airlines with cadet programs do. The result is that while airlines may have crews that meet the minimum training requirements, some airlines will have crews that are excellent but others are "dangerously marginal," said Voss. At airlines where safety and training standards are closely followed, the pilots in the cockpit "correct the missteps and correct problems on the spot. All of those little corrections eventually define the safety culture of that airline," said Voss. "If the crews are all on six-month contracts, that doesn't happen. Risky behavior goes unchallenged, professionalism decays, and disaster inevitably follows." A potentially even graver shortage looms of maintenance personnel, aviation groups say. Boeing forecasts that Asia will need a quarter-million new technicians over the next two decades, up from about 46,500 now. "It is a more difficult problem to solve," said Voss, "since the job is very unattractive and harder to train."
[Associated
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