Air India faces twin troubles simultaneously with snag-prone Dreamliners

NEW DELHI: For the second time in a week, Air India faced twin troubles simultaneously with the snag-prone Dreamliners when they were supposed to fly out of Delhi to Australia and UK on Thursday morning but had to be grounded.
The first snag was the most unexpected one. AI 113 was to take off for Birmingham with 126 passengers on board. The cabin crew realized that one of the flight deck doors had not shut properly. Sources said crew could hear sound of air from the door.

The pilot immediately brought the plane (VT-ANG) back to Terminal 3 where the door was shut properly. The plane taxied out again but the same problem persisted. It returned to the bay for the second time — almost an hour after it had first taxied out.

Engineers spent some hours trying to fix the problem — in vain.

Eventually AI had to arrange another Dreamliner to fly harried passengers to Birmingham.

Another Boeing 787 (VT-ANK) was to fly as AI 302 to Sydney with 246 passengers around the same time. This aircraft too developed a snag which could not be rectified by engineers after several hours.

Its "bus tie braker" — which is used to change aircraft's source of power if the primary source fails — failed. AI had to arrange for another Dreamliner to fly to Australia. Both the flights took off after several hours of delay.

Incidentally, last Friday, two Dreamliners supposed to fly to Moscow and Singapore had also developed snags simultaneously. Both these planes could not be repaired and AI had to arrange for another B-787s to operate these flights.

AI chief Rohit Nandan and DGCA chief Prabhat Kumar were among the stranded passengers when the Moscow flight developed a snag last week.

Sources say AI has, this year, faced almost 150 groundings of its Dreamliner flights.

Aviation secretary Ashok Lavasa has asked AI to submit a detailed report on the troubles faced with this brand new plane. AI has also been asked to see if other international airlines using this aircraft are also facing similar level of troubles.

"Just when we repeatedly face one type of problem and Boeing manages to find an answer to them, another issue crops us. While safety of the Dreamliner is not in question, the snags have become endemic and causing flight delays and cancellations regularly," said a source.

A senior AI official said the airline's engineering is in constant touch with Boeing.

Last week, aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju Pusapati told Parliament in a written reply that the AI's Dreamliner fleet did 9,902 take offs till June, 2014 — and as many as 318 of those flights faced "service delays attributed to technical snags".

AI sought compensation from Boeing for three counts of the Dreamliner — the over three-year delay in delivery of the aircraft; grounding of this aircraft for four months last year and for failure to meet "guaranteed performance" standards of fuel consumption as the plane has not proven to be as fuel efficient as it was promised to be and was the deal-clincher for AI placing an order for 27 of them.