Inside the five-fold gap between India’s aviation safety register and its public record

At around 2:15 on Thursday afternoon, a SpiceJet Boeing 737 taxiing in from Leh executed a turn at Bay 106 of Delhi’s Terminal 1 without a wing walker. Its right winglet struck the horizontal stabiliser of an Akasa Air 737 MAX boarding for Hyderabad. Two aircraft grounded, three hundred passengers delayed, two pilots and one air-traffic controller off duty, a DGCA investigation opened.

That is the fourth ground-phase contact at a major Indian airport in the first hundred days of 2026, following a catering van into a parked IndiGo at Kolkata, a pushback tractor on fire beneath an Etihad freighter at the same Terminal 1, and a wingtip brush between Air India and IndiGo at Mumbai. Four in four months. The honest question is whether this cluster means anything. The honest answer is that India does not currently publish the data that would let anyone outside DGCA know.

What the decade looks like in the public record

Safety Matters Foundation has compiled the 2016–2025 record of ground-phase safety occurrences at Indian civil airports, from AAIB final and preliminary reports, DGCA orders, the Aviation Safety Network country register, Aviation Herald, and contemporaneous news reporting. The consolidated dataset has 144 events. Apron incidents lead at 35. Runway excursions 27. Bird strikes during takeoff or landing roll 25. Runway incursions 17. Ground collisions 14. Tarmac fires 8. Security breaches 5. Fuel spills, by our definition, zero.

Delhi IGI (26) and Mumbai CSM (25) together carry 35 per cent of the decade’s events, consistent with their traffic share. Three years — 2023, 2024, 2025 — contain 66 of the 144 events, or 46 per cent of the decade. On severity, excluding the two flight-phase aircraft accidents in the window (Kozhikode IX1344 in August 2020 and Ahmedabad AI171 in June 2025, which sit in a separate causal category), five apron-side fatality events are in the record — an engine ingestion, an aerobridge retraction, a landing-gear-door entrapment, a maintenance-staircase fall, a T1-canopy collapse and a construction-worker fall. None involved an aircraft in flight. All were preventable at the airport-operator or ground-handling-concessionaire level. Monsoon months hold four of the five highest-incident months.

What Parliament tells us when we actually ask

Here is where the gap opens up. Successive Ministers of State for Civil Aviation have placed wildlife- and bird-hit counts on the public record through Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha written replies, available via Digital Sansad. The numbers are startling in a way that the news cycle’s episode-by-episode coverage of bird strikes has never conveyed.

The 2025 figure of 1,782 bird hits is up 39 per cent on 2024. Delhi IGI ran 185 bird hits in 2023 alone. Chandigarh went from 2 in 2018 to 25 in 2023 — a separate MoS disclosure. On the operational side, the Airports Authority of India’s SPI-SPT Booklet 2024 — the document that operationalises India’s State Safety Programme — records an actual runway-incursion rate of 14.12 per million movements against a target of 9.78. The target was missed. Applied to roughly 1.35 million scheduled movements last year, India saw about 19 runway incursions at AAI-administered airports in 2024 alone.

SMF’s public-record dataset captures four of those 19.

The three numbers that tell the real story

Set these three rates alongside each other:

Three rates. The US Federal Aviation Administration recorded 29.5 runway incursions per million operations in FY2024, via its mandatory-reporting register published quarterly at airport and category granularity. The Airports Authority of India’s SPI-SPT Booklet 2024 records an actual runway-incursion rate of 14.12 per million movements — against a target of 9.78, which was missed. The SMF public-record dataset for calendar 2024 captures runway incursions at approximately 3 per million movements.

First. Indian civil aviation’s actual runway-incursion rate, measured by AAI’s own State Safety Programme, is about half the US rate. India is not a global outlier on runway incursions; it sits inside its Asia-Pacific regional band, consistent with IATA’s 2024 finding that ASPAC’s all-accident rate of 1.04 per million sectors is below the global 1.13. The popular media framing that India has a runaway runway-incursion problem compared to mature aviation jurisdictions is not supported by the data.

Second. The gap that matters is not between India and the US. It is between India’s regulator and India’s public. AAI’s 14.12 per million is what the State Safety Programme records internally. The SMF public-record ~3 per million is what a researcher relying on AAIB final reports, news coverage and aggregator databases can see. The visibility ratio is about 22 per cent — roughly one in five AAI-logged events reach the public domain. That is a five-fold internal transparency gap, produced entirely by the fact that DGCA does not publish what it already collects. Close that one number and the India-vs-world conversation becomes rigorous for the first time.

The gap is not SMF’s failure. It is India’s publication regime failure.

The United States Federal Aviation Administration publishes its runway-incursion register at airport and category granularity, quarterly, for a country where the rate last year was 29.5 per million operations. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency publishes an annual safety review by occurrence category, country and operator type. IATA publishes its global and regional accident rates per million sectors. Indian civil aviation, which now carries more than 160 million domestic passengers a year, does not publish anything equivalent.

The DGCA does publish the Annual Safety Review. It uses performance indicators — airprox per million flights reduced 25 per cent, GPWS warnings per 10,000 departures reduced 92 per cent. These are useful markers of direction, not useful measures of level. AAIB India publishes final reports, but only 23 per cent of investigations initiated in 2023 and 2024 have final reports in the public repository two years later. Ministry of Civil Aviation responds to Parliament questions with tabular data, but the answers are question-by-question, slice-by-slice, never aggregated into a monthly public register in the format that other jurisdictions treat as routine.

The consequence is what this piece began with. Four ground-phase contacts in a hundred days become an apparent cluster. Without the denominator, nobody can say whether the hundred-day rate is statistically elevated or simply the expected variance around an under-reported baseline. The press covers each event as if it were unique; airlines, airport operators, and ground-handling concessionaires have no benchmark against which to self-assess; and the travelling public oscillates between complacency and panic. Every party loses.

The data exists. It is not reaching the people who can act on it.

Why an anonymous reporting channel matters alongside the regulator

The DGCA’s Mandatory Occurrence Report regime, under CAR Section 5 Series F Part IV, captures what operators formally report. It does not capture what ramp workers, wing walkers, Aircraft Maintenance Engineers, pilots and air-traffic controllers observe but feel unable to report formally — whether because of commercial pressure, peer dynamics, fear of licence implications, or simple procedural friction. Every serious safety regulator in the world recognises this gap and fills it with an anonymous, non-punitive, independent channel.

NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System has been operating in the United States since 1976; it receives around 100,000 reports a year from pilots, controllers, cabin crew, mechanics and ground workers, and has been a foundational data source for accident prevention for five decades. CHIRP performs an equivalent function in the United Kingdom. Europe’s voluntary-reporting schemes feed into ECCAIRS at state and regional levels. The design logic is the same in every case: a trusted, independent body receives anonymised reports, aggregates them into pattern insights, and publishes the learning without exposing the reporter.

Safety Matters Foundation operates RASE — a confidential anonymous safety-reporting platform for Indian aviation workers. Pilots, cabin crew, Aircraft Maintenance Engineers, air-traffic controllers, ground-handling agents, wing walkers, aerobridge operators, ramp supervisors, refuellers and airport security staff can submit observations, near-miss accounts, SOP-violation reports and safety-culture concerns without identifying themselves or their employer. Submissions are reviewed by SMF, aggregated into pattern-level insights, and published periodically as anonymised trend reports. RASE is not a substitute for regulatory publication; it is the complement that every mature safety regime also has.

Four asks, all boring, all achievable

Effective safety reform is boring, because it has to be.

1. DGCA should publish monthly ground-incident counts at airport and CICTT-category granularity, mirroring the format that FAA Runway Safety Statistics and IATA regional safety reports already use. This is a software project, not a policy question. Six months, executable by a small team.

2. AAIB India should meet the ICAO Annex 13 expectation that accident and serious-incident final reports be published within twelve months. The current 23 per cent completion rate for 2023-2024 investigations is the single biggest accident-prevention lever the authority controls and is not exercising.

3. Airport operators at Category-A metros should require IATA ISAGO-grade audits of all ground-handling concessionaires as a condition of continued apron access, and publish aggregate findings at the airport level.

4. Indian aviation workers — ramp staff, wing walkers, aerobridge operators, AMEs, pilots, ATCOs, refuellers, cabin crew — should have a trusted anonymous reporting channel they actually use. RASE, operated by Safety Matters Foundation, is that channel. The form is anonymous by design; no identifying information is required; SMF aggregates submissions into periodic pattern reports rather than forwarding individual cases to operators or the regulator. The regulator can and should acknowledge its existence; operators can and should tell their workforce they will not be disadvantaged for using it; the travelling public has a stake in hearing, through SMF’s published aggregates, what the current state of Indian airside safety culture actually looks like.

What Thursday’s wingtip was really asking us

The SpiceJet-Akasa contact at Delhi T1 will be investigated, a few sanctions will issue, the 2026 cluster will continue or it will not. At every step along that trajectory, the data that would let us respond proportionately will still be missing from the public domain — held by DGCA, AAIB and MoCA, visible only in fragments through Parliament replies, SPI booklets and AAIB’s slow-moving final reports.

Safety Matters Foundation’s 144-row hand-compiled dataset is not the problem. It is the evidence for the problem. Parliament has already told us that there were 7,489 wildlife strikes at Indian airports over six years, that the AAI missed its 2024 runway-incursion target by 44 per cent, that only a quarter of AAIB’s 2023-24 investigations have been published. The data exists. It is not reaching the people who can act on it. Closing that gap is a six-month project for the regulator, a parallel anonymous channel for the workforce, and an ongoing monitoring role for independent organisations like SMF. The Delhi incident is a good occasion to begin all three.

Safety Matters Foundation is an aviation-safety research organisation. This opinion piece is based on the Foundation’s 2016–2025 dataset of 144 ground-phase safety occurrences at Indian civil airports; Parliament-sourced wildlife-strike aggregates 2020–2025 from Digital Sansad; and the Airports Authority of India’s SPI-SPT Booklet 2024. The full dataset and the “Official vs SMF Gap” comparison sheet are available on request. Anonymous reporting platform: RASE 2.1 at safetymatters.co.in. Contact: admin@safetymatters.co.in

Download the full report and dataset

The opinion piece above summarises Safety Matters Foundation’s decade-level review of 144 ground-phase safety occurrences at Indian civil airports, 2016–2025. The full report and underlying dataset are available for download:

• Full report (PDF, ~970 KB):Indian_Civil_Airport_Ground_Incidents_Report_2016–2025.pdf
• Companion dataset (Excel, ~610 KB):Indian_Civil_Airport_Ground_Incidents_2016–2025.xlsx — full 144-row dataset with CICTT-coded pivots, CAR 5-F-III Positives sheet, and Official-vs-SMF Gap comparison

Feedback, corrections, and additional incidents for inclusion in future revisions are welcomed at admin@safetymatters.co.in.