Air India: Descent into Despair
Once upon a time, the Maharajah wearing a turban, smiled engagingly, and served you warm towels. Today, he serves you cockroaches in your omelette and plummets you 10,000 feet to death. Welcome to Air India, 2.0. When the Tatas took over the airline in 2022, it was hailed as a corporate coronation: the return of the prodigal to its original home, to be lovingly nursed back to world-class splendour. Instead, it's a Titanic with wings. Let's not mince words: passengers have died. Before, too. When AI 171 fell out of the sky in Ahmedabad, the world was told it was a tragedy. No, it was a reckoning. It lasted 30 seconds in the air. It cost over 270 lives. Days later, a Delhi-bound AI Dreamliner returned to Hong Kong, its airport of origin, after the pilot suspected a technical issue.
He said, 'We don't want to continue further.'—a clear indication that the traumatised pilot would rather go back to base than trust his machine. Another flight from San Francisco to Mumbai was stuck in Kolkata because of a technical snag. Yet another was forced back to Delhi post-takeoff due to technical failure—marking yet another unscheduled diversion. On Tuesday, Air India cancelled seven international flights, including six operated by Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners, as part of precautionary checks on its Dreamliner fleet, following heightened safety scrutiny by aviation authorities in the aftermath of the Ahmedabad crash.
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