Mumbai: Two Indian commercial pilots died within 48 hours of each other this week, as the Airline Pilots Association of India (ALPA) blamed the Narendra Modi government’s two-year delay in implementing flight safety rules for a deepening pilot fatigue crisis in the country.On April 29, Captain Tarundeep Singh of Air India suffered a heart attack during a layover in Bali. On April 30, Captain Arjun Naidu of Akasa Air passed away after a heart attack during a ground training session in Bengaluru. The ALPA, while asking the Modi government to ensure a time-bound implementation of the rules, blamed private airline operators for penalising and discouraging pilots’ attempts to seek flying exemptions due to exhaustion. Data released by an aviation safety NGO shows a 520% spike in the number of pilots designated as temporarily medically unfit (TMU) to fly between 2009 and 2023. Since August 2023, at least five Indian pilots – all under 50 years of age – have died while on duty. The Union government announced new Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) rules in January 2024, intended to address this crisis and offer adequate rest to pilots and aircraft crew. The FDTL regulations mandated a 48-hour weekly rest period for pilots, up from 36 hours, capped flight duty at 10 hours, and limited night landings to twice a week. The government, while announcing these measures on January 8 2024, dubbed them a “substantial step” in addressing pilot fatigue and “enhancing overall flight safety” in the country. Then Minister for Civil Aviation, Jyotiraditya Scindia, had in a post on X even said these moves would give India “necessary arsenal as it prepares to clinch the largest domestic aviation market title”. The regulations were scheduled to kick into effect by June 1, 2024. Domestic airline operators opposed these regulations, warning they would be forced to cancel 20% of flights because they would need to hire 10-20% more pilots, according to an estimate by the federation of Indian airlines. Buckling under pressure, the Modi government deferred the implementation by 13 months and announced that a phased implementation would begin in July last year. Since then, however, the government has issued repeated relaxations to airlines on implementing these rules.In December last year, weeks after the DGCA’s second-phase of implementation kicked off, IndiGo operations went into a tailspin after it failed to plan for the new crew limitations, resulting in over 4,500 flights being cancelled and tens of thousands of passengers left stranded. Following this, the DGCA granted the airline a two-month relief in implementing the regulations, despite finding the airline had ‘failed to comply’ with the regulator’s guidelines. “This problem happened because IndiGo didn’t pay attention to FDTL regulations. The airline had knowledge of the same but didn’t act,” Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Murlidar Mohol told journalists in December last year. In March this year, the DGCA granted Air India a similar relaxation in implementing FDTL regulations after the airline pointed to airspace closures increasing flight times as a result of the West Asia military crisis.The government had also put on hold a provision that barred airlines from offering leaves as a substitute for the mandatory weekly rest period. Such leave substitution, insiders said, was misused by airlines to prevent regular rest periods for pilots who were periodically offered leaves in exchange, instead.Pointing to these relaxations, known as ‘variations’ in civil aviation parlance, the ALPA India criticised them and said they had “materially diluted” the regulations. “These variations, originally conceived as transitional measures, have effectively become the norm. This defeats the purpose of fatigue management framework and perpetuates scheduling practices that operate at or near regulatory limits without adequate safety buffers,” said ALPA president Captain Sam Thomas, in the letter to the Ministry of Civil Aviation.Even as India’s civil aviation sector has grown multi-fold from 66 million passengers in 2014 to 161 million in 2024, the sector remains under-funded and under-staffed. The Wire had, last June, reported how the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s budget has seen drastic cuts: from Rs 755 crore in 2023-24 to merely Rs 70 crore in 2025-26, slashed by 91%. Similarly, key bodies like the Airports Authority of India and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Safety have 36% and 37% of its posts vacant, respectively, as per data available in June 2025.Last June, India saw one of its worst aviation accidents when an Air India 171 flight from Ahmedabad to London, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, crashed seconds after takeoff, killing a total of 260 people. Overworked pilots, opaque airlines Data reflects a similar crisis among the country’s pilots. The deaths of two Indian pilots in two days while on duty this week underlines this crisis, but since August 2023, five Indian pilots – all under 50 – have died either within a duty cycle or during the scheduled rest period, according to data by Safety Matters Foundation (SMF), an aviation safety NGO. The number of pilots who are increasingly falling ill has spiked: from 2009 when 25 pilots were declared temporarily medically unfit (TMU) – generally as a result of conditions like hypertension, anxiety and cardiac issues – to 2023, when a total of 155 pilots were found to be unfit due to such issues, according to SMF data. This is a 520% increase in 14 years.Experts said such data indicates the frazzled state of the country’s pilots.Captain Shakti Lumba, the former vice-president of flight operations at IndiGo from its founding till 2010, said such spikes in medically unfit pilots was “an indicator”. “It tells you that there is something wrong in the system,” he said. “In my 30 years in the Indian Airlines, there were maybe one or two cases of pilots being declared temporarily unfit,” Lumba added. ALPA India, in its letter, hinted that airlines might be trying to hide the true extent of the exertion facing the country’s pilots.In its letter to the ministry, ALPA president Thomas said airline operators were “discouraging and penalising” pilots for reporting fatigue and were rejecting reports that pilots were filing.“Available information obtained through RTI indicates an alarmingly low rate of acceptance of fatigue reports by operators. Such trends are inconsistent with the principles of a just safety culture and undermine fatigue risk management systems,” Thomas added.Pilots and other crew members can ‘report’ they are fatigued through an internal mechanism each airline builds. However, insiders said the system is broken. “Each time a pilot tries to report fatigue, the airline often penalises the pilot by stopping their lucrative international flights, which actually make them more money,” said Lumba, adding, “Internally, the airline starts giving such pilots bad rosters and marks them to be ‘undependable’.” “No pilot wants to suffer this fate,” he said.