Air India has cancelled eight international Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flights after the horrific aviation disaster last week. The passenger jets were hit by a mix of issues from aircraft unavailability, technical snags, airspace restrictions, and extended safety checks.
It comes nearly a week after an Air India Dreamliner crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad airport, killing at least 270 people, with one person surviving the crash. The cancellations on Tuesday affected services to major cities including London, Paris, Vienna and Dubai. At least three other Dreamliner flights have been grounded or delayed in the past 48 hours as India’s aviation regulator has ordered all Boeing 787s being operated by local carriers to be inspected.
A Boeing 777 operating the San Francisco-Mumbai route was also grounded on Tuesday because of a technical snag leaving over 220 passengers stranded for nearly five hours on board the aircraft.
“Our team tried to repair it but couldn’t. Special permission was then sought to allow passengers to disembark and complete immigration at Kolkata”, said an Air India official.
A flurry of Air India flights were forced to return back to base on Sunday after being hit with problems. One was a British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Chennai had to turn around mid-air when it suffered a “technical issue”.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner was less than an hour into its journey.
The airline’s statement said: “The flight landed safely with crew and customers disembarking as they normally would, and our teams are working hard to get their journeys back on track as soon as possible.”
Also on Sunday, a Hyderabad-bound Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt returned to the German airport, midway through the flight, following a bomb threat.
The flight LH752, also a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, took off from Germany around 2:14pm, local time, and was scheduled to land at Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in the early hours of Monday morning.
The disruption comes as pressure continues to mount on Air India and Boeing as the investigation into what went catastrophically wrong in the seconds after Flight 171 took-off.
Independent experts have raised questions about the position of the plane’s wing flaps, thrust generated by its engines and why its landing gear remained down in the moments before it fatally crashed.
