Directorate General of Civil Aviation

A commercially useful slot lets them coordinate connecting flights, aircraft rotations, and crew schedules, and losing it can disrupt much more than a single departure.

Under the Ministry of Civil Aviation slot guidelines, an airport-level committee comprising the operator, an Airports Authority of India air navigation representative, and DGCA assesses capacity, so airlines can comment before the findings and final capacity are published.

The airport's designated coordinator then allocates slots within those limits.

Now, airlines have conditional priority to retain slots from the previous equivalent season, known as historic precedence.

Even if there is a free market economy, there has to be some sort of oversight.

So even in this case, if you see there is a Director General of Civil Aviation, DGCA, which is there.

But effectively, it is a toothless triangle, right? You are effectively having only two airlines which are running.

Today, you have got Air India and then you have got Indigos.

So if a blanket fare cap comes with its own trade-offs, what else could make flying more predictable?

which is missing in India, but very doable and something that exists in more mature aviation markets is greater transparency.

So the issue right now is that the DGCA only publishes, you know, number of passengers who are flying.

They are not publishing data on actual prices paid for tickets sold.

Yeah.

Is it, what are you taking the video for? Content? Technically, is that even allowed by the DGCA? You're flouting some rules here and there.

It's not...

Then you're putting your face on it.

Sure.

Even better.

is like, wow.

But the other one that is important and must be watched more closely is air traffic.

India's domestic air passenger traffic has now declined marginally, point one eight percent year on year between January and August twenty twenty-six, according to data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, according to a report in The Economic Times.

The decline in itself is not much, except that this is supposed to be and expected to be a growth market, and growth two years ago was over seven percent for domestic aviation, but slowing since then for various reasons.

We should also remember that several airlines, including the biggest like Indigo and Air India, have cut back sharply on services as they grapple with high fuel prices thanks to the war that started in the end of February this year.

The regulator here is central.

It is either the DGCA or the central drug, CDSC, the drug regulator.

Or if you're doing something on genetic manipulation or editing, then it will be the review committee on genetic manipulation, etc., So a municipal corporation or even a state government can't waive any of this.

So it will not help if that sandbox starts without any coordination with these central institutes.

Indian airlines are estimated to have close to 14,000 pilots.

Following the 4th of August incident involving the Phuket-Delhi flight and before the DGCA direction, the Air India Group had voluntarily initiated one-time random drug tests on an estimated 5,000 pilots employed by Air India and Air India Express.

And in the end, in news making global headlines, Iran is increasingly relying on the Houthis in Yemen and aligned militias in Iraq to pressure Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the Gulf, according to regional officials and experts.

In July, Saudi Arabia and the US struck Iran-backed Iraqi militias after the groups who were blamed for drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities claimed by the Houthis.

Indian airlines are estimated to have close to fourteen thousand pilots.

Following the fourth of August incident involving the Phuket-Delhi flight and before the DGCA direction, the Air India Group had voluntarily initiated one-time random drug tests on an estimated five thousand pilots employed by Air India and Air India Express.

In other major news, international crude oil benchmark, Brent, has breached the hundred dollars per barrel mark again after one and a half months, triggered by the recent sharp escalation in the West Asia conflict, including attacks on oil tankers and petroleum infrastructure in the region.

The hundred dollars threshold was breached on Wednesday, and Brent futures continue to trade above that level today.