NEW DELHI, Dec 9: The Indian Air Force (IAF) has instituted a high level committee to inquire into the dissatisfaction of some officers and airmen over the Fifth Pay Commission award according to Squadron Leader R K Dhingra, Public Relations Officer.

However, other officers told The Indian Express that the IAF's operational preparedness is slowly sliding with decreasing serviceability of its various units owing to the technical officers pursuing a work-to-rule policy.

The demoralisation of technical officers arises from the Fifth Pay Commissionaward with disparities in pay scales between fliers and non-fliers in the Air Force.

According to reliable sources, there has been restricted flying for the past five days at Air Force stations in Bhuj and Jamnagar, Gujarat, near the Indo-Pak border; besides at a Jammu based unit. Also there have been serviceability problems of Mirage aircraft located in Gwalior recently. A radar unit in Bagdogara, Bengal, near the Sino-Indian border, has been rendered unserviceable for the past few days for lack of a printed circuit board.

Most Air Force hardware especially fighter aircraft, radar, missile and communication units, have outlived their lives as per manufacturer's specifications regarding the mean time between failures (MTBF). Despite pursuing periodic maintenance schedules to prevent break-down, these equipment invariably have problems and further require unscheduled servicing.

Technical officers to ensure serviceability of equipment-- which defines operational preparedness -- carry out its maintenance during non-working hours in a staggered fashion. However, now onwards they do not plan to work beyond the specified hours and any maintenance done during working hours will compromise operational preparedness. To illustrate, signal units ideally conduct maintenance only in the night so as not to distort inter-unit communication during the day. And the import of communication systems stems from the critical nature of command, control, communication and intelligence functions in wartime.

Till now, engineers performed on-the-spot improvisations and solved problems as far as possible at the field level. Attempting to go through proper channels only delays the repair process. A spin-off from such improvisation was higher serviceability, lower inventory levels, and limited dependence on imported spares.

Most hardware require servicing based either on calendar life or utility hours. In utility based servicing, radars require to be shut down once a month for cursory checks and for a week every six months. But in calendar based servicing, aircraft systems or sub-systems have to be certified for life extension to be declared airworthy machines. Now with engineer officers refusing to give certifications, aircrafts cannot fly and their moves have directly decreased operational preparedness of the Air Force.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.