India Clips Wings of Foreign Pilots with Poor English Skills

India has told 25 foreign commercial pilots, most of them from Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, to stop flying over the past year because their poor English posed a safety risk, an official said Thursday.

India's economic boom has brought a huge spike in air traffic handled by the country's outdated airports with more international flights coming in and 10 new domestic airlines starting up in the past decade - many of which have hired foreign pilots to fly their planes.

The result has often been planes landing in quick succession or circling airports as they wait for an opening, and the number of near misses has climbed steadily, reaching 21 in 2005, the latest year for which data is available.

Indian officials have put at least part of the blame for the near misses on bad communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, and on Thursday civil aviation authorities said they were trying to fix the problem by forcing out pilots with poor English skills.

"Twenty-five pilots, mainly from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have been asked to stop flying," said Maushumi Chakravarty, the spokeswoman for India's state-run Directorate General of Civil Aviation.

There are about 560 foreign commercial pilots flying in India.

Earlier Thursday, Kanu Gohain, the head of the DGCA, had told reporters at an aviation conference that English proficiency was a basic requirement because it was the globally used language for aviation communication, the Press Trust of India reported.

English is also the language of educated India, although Hindi is much more widely spoken across the country of more than 1 billion people.

India's airports handled 51 million domestic passengers in the last fiscal year that ended March 31, up 28 percent from the previous year, according to the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a consulting firm in Sydney, Australia.

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