The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau has made a recommendation that reaches far beyond one business-jet accident. It wants the Directorate General of Civil Aviation to conduct a one-time check of training records for fixed-wing pilots, particularly in non-scheduled and general aviation operations, to establish whether mandatory simulator exercises were actually completed.
The recommendation followed the September 2023 crash of a VSR Ventures Learjet 45XR at Mumbai airport, which seriously injured all eight people on board. The investigation found failures in the approach and aircraft handling, but it also raised concerns about the completeness of recurrent training, record keeping and internal audit at the operator.
That makes this more than an accident report. It is a question about trust. India’s aviation system relies on the idea that a pilot’s licence, recurrent simulator session and operator training record represent real evidence of competence. The records are meant to show that pilots have practised the emergency scenarios they may one day face in flight, not merely that an administrative process has been completed.
AAIB’s recommendation suggests that the regulator cannot simply assume those records are always a reliable reflection of the training delivered.
The issue is not whether pilots have been to a simulator. It is whether every required exercise was conducted, assessed and documented in a way that can be independently verified. In the Learjet case, AAIB said some critical emergency items were not carried out in full during the annual cycle of recurrent training for some company pilots.
The investigation has recommended that pilots practise recovery from a full stall or after stall-warning activation in climb, cruise, approach and landing configurations. That is important because emergency performance is not built by reading a procedure or completing a generic training session. It depends on practising specific responses in realistic phases of flight, often under time pressure and with multiple warnings competing for the crew’s attention.
A simulator is where an airline or charter operator can safely expose pilots to circumstances that cannot be recreated in ordinary flying. It is where crews should confront low-speed warnings, unstable approaches, rejected landings, engine failures, windshear, system malfunctions and other high consequence events. The quality of that exercise matters as much as the fact that a simulator booking took place.
Business aviation deserves particular scrutiny because it can operate differently from a large airline. A major airline may have dedicated training departments, large fleets of standardised aircraft, extensive data monitoring and layers of internal quality assurance. A smaller non-scheduled operator may have fewer aircraft, smaller training teams, more varied operations and a greater reliance on external simulator providers.
That does not make the sector inherently unsafe. It does mean that supervision must be designed for its realities. A single weak process in a small operator can affect a significant share of its pilots and aircraft.
The AAIB has also recommended that non-scheduled and general aviation operators develop specific procedures to ensure mandatory training is completed, including critical emergency exercises. It has urged verification of pilot records from time to time and called for internal audits to be carried out in their true letter and spirit, with the effectiveness of those audits checked during DGCA surveillance.
The scale of the task will depend on the quality of India’s records. A modern system should allow DGCA inspectors to trace a pilot’s training history, identify the simulator used, verify the instructor and examiner, see which manoeuvres were completed, review assessment outcomes and detect unusual patterns. If records are dispersed across operators, simulator centres and paper files, the exercise becomes slower and more vulnerable to gaps.
DGCA will also need the staff and specialist capability to do this credibly. A large document review can become an administrative exercise if inspectors lack time to test records against simulator programmes, crew rosters, instructor records and operator procedures. The aim cannot be to collect declarations of compliance. It must be to test whether compliance happened.
India’s aviation sector is growing quickly, with airlines expanding fleets, regional airports gaining traffic, charter operations serving more corporate and medical missions, and new pilot demand building across the industry. Growth makes strong training oversight more important, not less.
The AAIB’s proposal offers DGCA an opportunity. It can treat the Learjet report as a narrow corporate-aviation lesson, or it can use the recommendation to establish a clearer national standard for training evidence, audit quality and regulatory verification.
The important question is not whether every pilot has a training record. It is whether the record can withstand the hardest possible test, which is this. When a crew faces a critical emergency in flight, can the system prove that they had genuinely practised what they were expected to do.