India’s skies face a talent crunch

By Anand Jacob Verghese

The ongoing meltdown at IndiGo underlines how acute India’s pilot shortage has become. In November alone, the airline cancelled 1,232 flights — of which 755 were reportedly due to crew shortages and compliance with new rest‑and‑duty norms. Between December 2 and 5, IndiGo scrapped ~2,000 flights, forcing the aviation regulator to intervene and temporarily relax some norms.

This crisis raises a pressing question: can India’s flying training organisations (FTOs) scale up fast enough, and at the required quality, to meet the rising demand for trained pilots, particularly as the airlines would be hiring hundreds of pilots and co-pilots to stabilise operations? Without meaningful improvements in training infrastructure, curricula, and capacity, the industry risks facing similar operational disruptions even as air traffic continues to grow.

India’s aviation industry is entering an unprecedented growth cycle. With Indian carriers collectively ordering nearly 1,700 new aircraft, and the government projecting a requirement of 30,000 additional pilots over the next decade, the country is on the verge of a major talent crunch. Today, India has ~6,000 active commercial pilots. This is far short of what will be needed as new aircraft, new routes, and new airports come online at a record pace. The government’s policy is aggressively pro-expansion: 50 new airports in the next five years, 120 new destinations in 10 years, and a renewed push under UDAN. Clearly, aircraft and routes are arriving faster than the supply of high-quality pilots, technicians, and aviation personnel can keep pace.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)’s first-ever ranking of FTOs in October offered a reality check. Of the 35 FTOs assessed, none achieved an A or A+ rating. Thirteen schools were graded B, and 22 received C, indicating that most facilities remain far from global standards. This comes at a time when pilot training costs are rising sharply. An independent commercial pilot licence (CPL) can cost Rs 35-50 lakh, while airline cadet programmes can touch Rs 70 lakh to Rs 1 crore. Yet, placement outcomes remain inconsistent. Recent DGCA data shows that nearly one in three licensed Indian pilots was unemployed, largely due to uneven training quality and cyclical hiring.

Infrastructure constraints exacerbate the challenge. Many FTOs still rely on ageing single-engine trainers with limited modern avionics. Access to quality simulators and modules — including multi-crew cooperation (MCC), upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT), and crew resource management (CRM) — is sporadic despite being industry-standard abroad. Other training segments face similar challenges. India outsources over 85% of its aircraft maintenance work, despite new maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) investments such as Safran’s LEAP engine facility in Hyderabad. Drone training is fragmented, and cabin crew/ground operations courses are largely unregulated.

India requires both scale and quality transformation to meet the demands of the next 20 years, and this calls for a two-tier reform strategy. At the system level, India must move from isolated FTOs to integrated training ecosystems. This means creating dedicated training airports or clusters that bring together multiple FTOs, aircraft maintenance engineering schools, drone academies, and MRO facilities — many of which can be housed at underutilised UDAN airports.

Quality-linked incentives are also essential. Access to AAI concessions, land leases, and credit support should be tied to DGCA performance metrics, supported by public dashboards that track pass rates, placement outcomes and safety audit results to improve transparency and accountability. Curricula must be modernised through a decisive shift to competency-based training aligned with ICAO standards, alongside integrated CPL pathways that include MCC and jet-readiness modules.

Finally, financing needs to become significantly more accessible. This requires affordable, long-term education loans backed by government guarantees, as well as targeted scholarships for women and cadets from smaller towns, ensuring that training opportunities expand in an inclusive and sustainable manner. Academies will need to chase A-grade DGCA rankings, invest in modern fleets, integrate advanced behavioural and simulator training, and build strong airline/MRO partnerships.

The expansion into adjacent domains, such as drones, aviation management, human factors, data analytics, and cybersecurity, will define the next-generation aviation campus. Institutions also need robust counselling ecosystems to prevent the rising ‘CPL but no job’ debt trap.

India is poised to become one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets by 2035. But the DGCA’s rankings reveal a training system that has not kept pace with the sector’s ambitions. India will need to expand capacity rapidly, and raise training standards to global benchmarks. If achieved, it will not only meet its domestic pilot and technician needs, but also emerge as a global aviation talent hub by 2047. If it fails, the country risks grounding its growth story.

(The writer is chairman, Orient Flights Aviation Academy, Mysuru, and
Hindustan Group of Institutions)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.