Naidu wants every airline pilot tested for drugs at least once a year

Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu said this week that the government wants every commercial pilot in India to sit a random psychoactive-substance test at least once a year, in place of the current rule that only 10 percent of the pilot body must be tested annually.

He spoke on the sidelines of an industry event in New Delhi on 25 August, then chaired an evening meeting with Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha, DGCA chief Vir Vikram Yadav and airline representatives. Officials at that meeting discussed a redraft of the Civil Aviation Requirements that govern drug testing.

The incident that moved the file

On 4 August the captain of an Air India Phuket-Delhi flight was involved in a sudden altitude-drop event. The captain later tested positive for marijuana. Air India and Air India Express then began a one-time mandatory test of their combined pilot group, about 5,000 people, from 13 August.

The Federation of Indian Pilots had already asked the DGCA to raise the annual sample from 10 percent to 25 percent. The ministry has gone further. Naidu's preferred model is 100 percent coverage, one random test per pilot per year.

The numbers the regulator has to staff

India-based airlines employ more than 11,000 pilots on some counts and about 12,000 on others. The wider licensed pool is cited around 25,000. A jump from 10 percent to 100 percent is a tenfold rise in collection, chain-of-custody work, laboratory confirmation and roster disruption. Naidu said the DGCA is measuring that operational cost against the safety case. He also said India would, if the rule is written this way, be the first country to require an annual random test for every commercial pilot.

The present Civil Aviation Requirement already allows testing for psychoactive substances. What it does not do is force every name on the roster through a lab each year. Airlines argue that a blanket rule will pull captains off pairings, clog collection rooms at metro airports and create legal fights over false positives and off-duty use. Safety officials argue that a 10 percent draw is a lottery that the Phuket-Delhi case has already failed.

What happens next

No gazette notification has been issued. The DGCA is still taking comments. Naidu said there are several ways to design the test and that both safety and operations have to be weighed. The working idea on the ministry side is simple: every pilot, once a year, at a date the pilot does not pick.

That design still leaves open questions the CAR rewrite will have to answer. Which substances sit on the panel. How long a pilot is grounded after a positive screen pending confirmation. Whether the Air India one-time sweep counts toward the first year's quota. Who pays for the extra laboratory capacity.

Until those clauses are written, the binding rule remains 10 percent. The political instruction is now public. After a captain tested positive on a scheduled wide-body sector, the minister has said the sample size should be the entire list.