Why Air India Wants a Quick Solution For the Dreamliner Glitches

Tuesday, 12th February 2013 at 03:06am

Air India's woe seems to stretch on much longer than expected as the grounding of all Dreamliner aircraft around the world is still in effect.

The grounding costs the airline an estimated daily loss of Rs30-40 lakh, more or less, in terms of fuel bill and schedule changes on affected routes. Its rival airlines, meanwhile, are taking advantage of this.

While it is not a substantial amount for the moment, it might feel the pinch if the grounding will go on for more weeks. The airline have been on the red since 2006 when it merged with Indian Airlines.

Early this year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States ordered airlines around the world to ground their respective fleet of Dreamliner due to successive problems encountered by the aircraft recently. Without much options, Air India implemented a major restructuring of its fleet to avoid major setback in its overall operations.

The airline is expected to take delivery of the same aircraft by March this year in addition to the six it received last year. Six more Dreamliner will arrive through March 2014. By then, the flag carrier will have a total of 14 B787 aircraft in its fleet. Air India is the only Indian carrier to have a fleet of Dreamliner.

As a result of the restructuring, its Mumbai-Singapore and Chennai-Singapore services are affected. To remedy this equipment shortage, the flight originating in Mumbai will now have to make a stopover at Chennai to pick up passengers before proceeding to Singapore, its final destination.

The five-times weekly Delhi-Tokyo service has to be canceled due to lack of planes. Its flights to Paris and Frankfurt, however, are unaffected with the deployment of the larger B777LR aircraft.

The airline official said that they will ask Airbus company to compensate their losses due to the grounding of its Dreamliner aircraft. While claiming for compensation is possible, they are not sure how much and when, if any, they can get the compensation. For the meantime, however, the airline has to absorb more losses while grounding is still in effect.

The airline observes that the Dreamliner has given them so much headache since its expected delivery date was postponed for another three years. When they finally received the airliner, a series of mechanical glitches haunted it, from battery problems to fuel leakage to door malfunction.

Aviation experts noted, however, that the said problems in certain Dreamliner planes should not be a cause for concern as they sometimes occur in a number of aircraft straight from the factory. But the battery problem is something Boeing company should look into as it doesn't happen too often in many of its new planes.

Air India is hoping to resuscitate its ailing operations with the acquisition of a fleet of Dreamliner.

By: Pete Lee.