Airline pilots and flight crew will be grounded if they are found suffering from hypertension before flying under fresh medical guidelines laid down by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.

Taking a serious view of high blood pressure as well as obesity among flight crew, the DGCA came out with detailed guidelines to be compulsorily followed by the civil air carriers before their respective crew undertake flying duties.

The DGCA has set mandatory standards for airlines to get blood pressure of the crew members checked and conduct medical examination for obesity.

The regulatory body has categorically stated that if any crew member was found to be suffering from hypertension or high blood pressure in tests conducted 24 hours before flying, they would be taken off from flying duties. A blood pressure limit of 140/90 is treated by DGCA as the upper limit of normal.

Those being treated for hypertension would be treated as being temporarily unfit for carrying out flying activities, the DGCA said.

Notwithstanding the fact that certain airlines are being pulled up by courts for discriminating against overweight airhostesses, the DGCA has also come out with detailed rules to define obesity.

While acknowledging that there are no standard and universally accepted guidelines to measure obesity, the DGCA said one of the better methods to measure obesity was body mass index (BMI), which was a reliable indicator of body fat, as the correlation between body mass and body fat was fairly strong.

The DGCA also opined that BMI and waist-hip ratio were to be taken as parameters for grading and assessing obesity in civilian aircrew, rather than height-weight tables.

To measure body composition, it also recommended skinfold thickness and lean body mass as other measures.

The DGCA also recommended that the patient's risk status should be assessed by determining the degree of obesity, based on BMI, the presence of obesity and the presence of cardiovascular disease risk factors, sources added.