Air India Cancels Dreamliner Flight

Sunday, 5th October 2014 at 03:43am

The national flag carrier seems to have a bad luck with its fleet of B787 aircraft, touted as the world's most fuel-efficient jetliner, since it started to acquire the fleet in 2012.

The airline has an outstanding order from Boeing company a total of 27 Dreamliners, of which 8 have already been delivered and are currently in operation.

The latest incident, although minor, involved another B787 flight which was canceled due to clogged toilets. The aircraft, flight AI301, was due to leave Melbourne on Friday bound for Delhi, but had to be canceled due to the said problem. Passengers were either billeted in a nearby hotel or put on other flights.

The airline suffered yet another economic loss as it has to pay the passengers' accommodation and tickets for those who took other flights. It had to arrange another set of flight crew for the delayed flight as the flight duty time limitation (FDTL) of the original crew members had already elapsed.

On the same day, another Dreamliner jet, a Singapore-Chennai flight was delayed by several hours after engineers detected a technical problem in the aircraft that prevented it to take off on time. The flight AI347 eventually left Singapore and was able to reach Chennai at 6PM, more than seven hours late of its original estimated time of arrival of 10:30AM.

The day before the twin incidents on Friday last week, a London-bound B787 had to make a u-turn back to Delhi three hours onto its flight after its air-conditioning system malfunctioned.

A week before that, Air India had to ground one Dreamliner, after it was found to have developed a crack on its windshield.

All in all, the flag carrier has reported a total of over 370 glitches of its fleet all attributed to Dreamliner jets. As a result, its operations have been affected.

There are currently 16 airlines around the world operating a combined total of 134 Dreamliners in their fleet.

On September 29 this year, Indian PM Narendra Modi met with Boeing CEO, W. James McNerney in Washington to discuss important matters regarding India's ongoing business relationship with the world's Boeing aircraft. Air India's CEO, Rohit Nandan, himself was also present during the meeting.

By: Pete Lee.