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With a focus on the availability of sufficient and suitably qualified and experienced manpower, including training and duty time limitation and facilities such as hangers, stores, spares, consumables, special tools and equipment, aviation regulator Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has started an audit of airlines.

Officials said that the audit will also look into maintenance data for all types of aircraft in the fleet, quality assurance system (for conducting internal audits and quality assessments), aircraft grounded due to lack of spares, the multiple minimum equipment list (MEL) and the maintenance control centre.

Scores of flights have been diverted owing to multiple technical snags in Indian carriers' aircraft during the last week.

As per the aviation regulator, the audit teams are to be headed by an officer not below the rank of Deputy Director of Airworthiness and will include two other officers of the Airworthiness Directorate (headquarters/regions). The team leader will provide the report of the audit to the DGCA headquarters on the day following the completion of the audit.

The DGCA teams had recently carried out spot checks of planes belonging to different airlines and found that properly qualified personnel were not being deployed by the airlines for maintenance purposes. Before each departure, an aircraft is checked and certified by an aircraft maintenance engineer.

Following a series of technical snag related occurrences in planes in the last week, the aviation regulator during the last week had said that all the aircraft at base and transit stations should be released by certifying staff holding licence with appropriate authorisation by their organisation.