{"id":71506,"date":"2026-08-14T19:20:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/why-isnt-aviation-spoken-of-in-the-same-breath-as-medicine-and-engineering-by-dev-punj-vp-chimes-aviation-academy-caa\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T19:20:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:50:32","slug":"why-isnt-aviation-spoken-of-in-the-same-breath-as-medicine-and-engineering-by-dev-punj-vp-chimes-aviation-academy-caa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/why-isnt-aviation-spoken-of-in-the-same-breath-as-medicine-and-engineering-by-dev-punj-vp-chimes-aviation-academy-caa\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Isn\u2019t Aviation Spoken of in the Same Breath as Medicine and Engineering?- By Dev Punj, VP, Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Dev Punj, Vice President, Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Gurugram<\/strong><\/strong> (Haryana) [India], August 14:<\/strong> Ask a room full of parents in India what they want their child to become, and you\u2019ll hear \u2018doctor\u2019, \u2018engineer\u2019, or \u2018maybe a civil servant\u2019. Somewhere down the list, if it comes up at all, someone will mention pilot \u2013 usually followed by a comment about how expensive it is or how it\u2019s \u201can uncertain path\u201d or \u201cwhether it is a practical career at all\u201d. Nobody says that about medicine, even though medicine is expensive too. Nobody says it about engineering.<\/p>\n

That gap is worth sitting with, because it isn\u2019t really about money. It\u2019s about how we talk about the professions themselves.<\/p>\n

Three professions, one kind of training; treated very differently<\/h3>\n

Medicine and engineering share a public image built on years of visible rigour: entrance exams, licensing boards, residencies, apprenticeships, and continuing certification. Most of us know the shape of the journey even if we\u2019ve never lived it. Aviation has an equivalent structure \u2013 arguably a stricter one \u2013 and few outside the industry can describe it.<\/p>\n

Nor is\u00a0aviation training<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>simply about learning to control an aircraft. A cadet must develop a working understanding of navigation, meteorology, aircraft systems, aerodynamics, regulations, human performance and operational decision-making. The knowledge is technical, the practical training is closely supervised, and progress depends on demonstrating competence at every stage. Aviation may follow a different educational route from medicine or engineering, but it is no less serious as a field of professional study.<\/p>\n

A commercial pilot doesn\u2019t finish training once and fly for forty years on the strength of a single certificate. Every six months, pilots undergo simulator checks and are tested again \u2013 not as a formality, but as a condition keeping their licence valid. Medical checks are recurring, not one-time. In a modern commercial jet, over 80 parameters are logged every second, which are reviewed and can be scrutinised. Almost no other job has so many aspects of their work being constantly recorded. Very few professions build recertification this deeply into the job itself, and yet the public conversation around aviation rarely mentions it. We talk about turbulence and delays. We don\u2019t talk about the discipline that keeps both from becoming something worse.<\/p>\n

At\u00a0Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA)<\/a><\/strong>, this is the part of the profession we prepare cadets for and the part that gets talked about the least. Cadets don\u2019t just learn to fly an aircraft; they learn to be tested on flying it, over and over, for the rest of their working lives. That\u2019s closer to how a surgeon or a structural engineer is trained than most people realize. Medicine got centuries to build its public mythology. Aviation, as a mass profession, has had decades.<\/p>\n

What the job actually looks like<\/h3>\n

Talk to a first officer the morning of a flight, and the picture that emerges has little to do with the uniform. The day starts hours before boarding, with a briefing on weather, fuel, and route that the crew has to absorb and question, not just receive. A walk-around of the aircraft follows \u2013 a physical, methodical check of the machine they\u2019re about to fly, done in person every time, regardless of how many times it\u2019s been done before. In the cockpit, checklists run before the engines even start, a call-and-response between two pilots designed so neither one ever relies purely on memory.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the actual flying, most of which is calm, exact, and almost invisible to passengers who assume the aircraft is largely flying itself. It isn\u2019t. Every phase of the flight has a decision point behind it \u2013 when to climb, when to hold, what to do if something in the cockpit doesn\u2019t look right \u2013 made by two people trained to think under pressure and to catch each other\u2019s mistakes before they matter. Landing safely at the end of a routine flight is itself the product of hundreds of small correct decisions nobody outside the cockpit ever sees.<\/p>\n

For a young cadet, this is the part worth aspiring to \u2013 not the layovers or the uniform, but the fact that by the time they\u2019re a few years into the job, their judgement is trusted with hundreds of lives at a time and trusted enough that they\u2019ll be tested on that judgement again and again for the rest of their career. Few professions hand a twenty-five-year-old that much responsibility this early, with this much structure built around making sure they\u2019re ready for it.<\/p>\n

A profession is judged by its worst day, not its best one<\/h3>\n

Part of why medicine and engineering command instant respect is that failure in those fields is visible, personal, and immediate \u2013 we understand exactly what\u2019s at stake when something goes wrong. Aviation carries the same weight, but the industry has spent so much energy engineering failure out of the system that the public rarely sees what that effort looks like from the inside. Redundancy, checklists, standard operating procedures, and a culture that rewards reporting mistakes instead of hiding them \u2013 this is aviation\u2019s version of medical protocol. Yet a profession that has quietly built some of the safest systems in industrial history gets less public credit for rigour than professions with far more visible failure rates.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a communication problem as much as anything else. Doctors and engineers have decades of television, literature, and family folklore built around the training itself. Pilots have plenty of folklore too \u2013 it just tends to stop at the uniform and the travel, without going any further into what the job actually demands of a person\u2019s judgement under pressure.<\/p>\n

What changes the story<\/h3>\n

The fix isn\u2019t a marketing campaign. It\u2019s making the training itself visible, the way medical colleges and engineering institutes have made theirs visible for generations. Academies that publish what a cadet actually goes through \u2013 the hours, the failure rates in checkrides, the recurring exams that never really end \u2013 do more for the profession\u2019s standing than any slogan could.<\/p>\n

At\u00a0Chimes<\/a><\/strong>, we\u2019ve leaned into that visibility on purpose: standardized fleets, in-house maintenance, structured cadet pathways and training systems designed around consistency.<\/p>\n

The principle is not very different from the one that governs a respected teaching hospital: training quality must be demonstrated through standards, systems and outcomes, not merely claimed. When an academy\u2019s graduates are hired on the strength of their knowledge, discipline, and professional readiness that airlines expect, confidence begins to build not only in the institution but also in the profession itself. Aviation has that signal available. It just hasn\u2019t been telling that story out loud.<\/p>\n

The bigger opportunity<\/h3>\n

There\u2019s a reason this matters beyond professional pride. A country that talks about aviation with the same seriousness it brings to medicine and engineering builds a deeper, steadier pipeline into it. People choose professions partly based on how those professions are spoken about at home, and aviation deserves to be spoken about for what it demands, not just what it offers. That\u2019s the same shift medicine and engineering went through decades ago, and it\u2019s overdue in aviation.<\/p>\n

India is in an unusually good position to lead that shift. The country already has the scale, the training capacity, and \u2013 as its aviation talent increasingly finds its way into cockpits abroad \u2013 the growing proof that the training holds up against any standard in the world. What\u2019s missing isn\u2019t capability. It\u2019s the public conversation catching up to what the profession has already become.<\/p>\n

The day aviation gets spoken of in the same breath as medicine and engineering won\u2019t be the day it becomes as rigorous. It already is. It\u2019ll be the day enough people finally recognise it.<\/p>\n

Dev Punj is the Vice President at Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dev Punj, Vice President, Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA) Gurugram (Haryana) [India], August 14: Ask a room full of parents in India what they want their child to become, and you\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71507,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_rishi_post_view_count":3},"categories":[7],"tags":[673],"class_list":["post-71506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-lifestyle","rishi-post"],"rishi__cb_customizer_meta":"","comments_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newswiredelhi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}