India’s aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has added new features to its e-governance platform for stakeholders. The eGCA, a single window e-governance platform, has been enhanced to further improve the ease of doing business in the civil aviation ecosystem, a senior DGCA official said recently.

The update includes the provision to get the flying hours of pilots on a real-time basis as this would also help in quick processing of licence applications. The pilot e-logbook in eGCA has been merged with several operators’ internal software through API (Application Programming Interface) whereby pilots’ flying records can be directly transferred into their e-logbooks on the eGCA portal.

An API using which different carriers would channel their pilot data from their system to eGCA has been devised by IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

“Out of eight airlines which participated in the integration process, IndiGo has already implemented this interface. Indigo pilots’ flying records are now getting directly populated in e-logbook in eGCA software from IndiGo’s AIMS software,” the official said.

Other airlines, including Air India/Air India Charters, Air Asia, Go First, SpiceJet, Vistara and Blue Dart are in the final stages of testing and are expected to implement the same in another one to two months.

As the manual intervention in the process has become almost negligible, the integration will help DGCA in faster processing of applications as the verification of flying data in submitted applications will be considerably reduced, PTI quoted the official as stating.

The facility will also aid in timely submission of applications by the pilots for the issuance, renewal and endorsement of licences as it would remove multi-layer data-validation steps, the official added.

In addition, the DGCA has integrated the Air Operator Certificate (AOC) database with the civil aviation ministry’s heli-sewa portal which would allow landing requests to get processed faster. With the integration of operators’ AOC database with heli-sewa portal, the official said the workload has considerably reduced for the applicants and helicopter operators as they can access both eGCA and the portal through the same ID.

Further, the process related to the issuance of Certificate of Airworthiness (C of A) and Airworthiness Review Certificate (ARC) has been enhanced.

Operators are now issued the certificate of airworthiness with respect to newly inducted aircraft at foreign delivery locations through the regulator’s eGCA portal for ferrying the planes to India, according to the aviation regulator.