Sitting on a plush leather-coated couch in his spacious office in Central Jakarta recently, Edward Sirait, the general affairs director of Lion Air, was busy receiving calls from reporters who bombarded him with questions about a former Lion pilot who recently stood trial for drug possession.
Earlier this year, Tangerang police arrested Muhammad Nasri, 40, along with other two people at a drugs party where four ecstasy pills and a package of crystal methamphetamine were found concealed in the pilot’s tie.
In one of the case hearings last month, a psychologist who examined Nasri during police questioning, testified that the defendant had admitted he was a long-time drug user and usually consumed drugs “before and after flying”. On Oct. 27, the Tangerang District Court sentenced Nasri to five years in prison.
“Nasri had been fired long before the arrest. He had a long record of disciplinary violations,” Edward said recently.
Edward, who together with Lion president director Rusdi Kirana has successfully turned the 10-year-old airline into the country’s leading low-cost carrier, refused to comment on how Nasri had managed to pass the airline’s medical screening.
Nasri’s story highlights a lurking problem in the airline industry, where recruitment processes seem too slack, as operators struggle with a shortage of pilots due to a limited number of aviation schools.
With the rapid increase in aircraft passengers over the past decade, Indonesia is home to around 50 airline operators.
The Transportation Ministry’s Air Transportation Director General, Herry Bhakti, has said the country needs up to 600 extra pilots a year, two times higher than the total number of pilots graduating from the country’s eight aviation schools.
With a lack of human resources, airlines have no option other than to extend the workload on existing pilots, which may increase the risk of air accidents.
According to the ministry’s airworthiness director, Diding Sunardi, the 28.5 percent jump in the number of aircraft accidents between January and Nov. 8 this year, as compared to last year, can primarily be blamed on human error.
A senior pilot with one of the country’s major airlines said it normally took between 12 and 15 years for a co-pilot to be promoted to pilot. “But some local airlines offer ‘quick promotions’ to become pilots after less than 10 years experience.”
Some airlines have even hired Transportation Ministry aircraft inspectors as pilots to cover the shortfall. Capt. Toto Soebandoro, the quality, safety and security director for Sriwijaya Airlines, the country’s third-largest carrier, admitted such hirings of several ministry inspectors.
“But we only hired them [as pilots] temporarily,” he said.
As of mid-2011, there were around 7,000 pilots working for domestic airlines, 300 of them foreign nationals.
Aviation observer Alvin Lie believes airlines’ policies to prematurely promote inexperienced co-pilots and hire government inspectors are a serious threat to air safety.
“It’s true that nowadays pilots can rely on advanced, computerized control systems when flying, but there is no guarantee that young, inexperienced pilots are ready to fly the aircraft manually if the systems fail,” he said.
“Hiring ministry inspectors as pilots would, of course, put the inspectors’ independence into question. There would be strong doubts as to whether an inspector would dare to take firm action against an airline that had hired him or her if that airline violated air safety procedures.”
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