A number of Russian airline pilots have been flying illegally without the required recurrent training and recency of experience, according to the local safety authority, which has suspended their licences.
Following an audit of flight hours and training currency, the Krasnoyarsk regional department of Russia's state service of civil aviation (GSGA) has suspended 78 pilots' licences. The audit followed the discovery, during the investigation of the 4 July Vladivostok Avia Tupolev Tu-154 crash near Irkutsk, that the length of time since the two pilots had last flown caused the validity of their licences to lapse. The crash resulted in the death of 145 passengers and crew.
The audit revealed that some pilots had boosted their logged hours of flying experience by writing non-existent flights into their log books, and others who had falsified their training records to maintain their licence currency.
One small operator was accused of ordering its aircrew to falsify their training records in order to reduce costs. Two other carriers with pilots carrying incorrect logs were identified as Kras Air and Sibaviatrans, the largest airlines operating in the region.
The regional office also grounded 20 aircraft for safety reasons, and ordered them to be removed from service.
Krasnoyarsk is the first of the 22 regional GSGA offices to publish information on the results of its audit. The western regions of Russia, where control is usually tight, are understood to have few violations, and the same applies to the Novosibirsk region, but similar problems are anticipated in several other areas where airline economics are marginal.
Source: Flight International
