India, Oct. 3 -- A committee has recommended turning the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) into a statutory Civil Aviation Authority of India, with its own law, its own money and control over its own hiring. DGCA's record over the past year makes the case. Nearly half its 1,630 sanctioned posts are vacant. A parliamentary panel said in March that recent incidents, including the Air India crash in Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, revealed "systemic rather than episodic failures". And when IndiGo's schedule collapsed last December, the regulator granted the airline exemptions from crew-fatigue rules that pilots had spent 13 years in court to win.

The December waiver showed how little room the regulator has. Indian aviation has ...