Air India races to inspect Dreamliners after fatal crash triggers policy shake-up
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Air India has completed enhanced checks on 22 of their Boeing 787 aircraft following Thursday's crash killing 241 passengers and 33 on the ground.
The extra surveillance comes following civil aviation regulator DGCA's directive to Air India for conducting additional maintenance checks on its Boeing 787 aircraft equipped with GEnx engines, including assessments of certain take-off parameters, electronic engine control tests and engine fuel-related checks.
Air India has a fleet of 33 Dreamliners, the oldest of which was acquired in 2012. The plane that went down entered service in 2014.Sources in Air India said that the checks didn't find any significant faults, but a multiple flights which was to be operated by the 787 planes, like that to Sydney and Melbourne, were cancelled.'The cancellations are due to a combination of factors including enhanced inspection which took longer time than expected and closure of the Iranian airspace,' an Air India official said. DGCA chief Faiz Ahmed Kidwai didn't respond to messages on the issue.
Airlines are steering clear of much of the Middle East since Friday after Israeli attacks on Iranian sites followed by retaliatory attacks by Iran in the latest geopolitical conflict in the region.In a briefing by India's aviation authorities on Saturday, authorities confirmed that Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, who was piloting the flight, sent a distress call to air traffic control less than a minute after it took off from Ahmedabad airport at 1.39 PM on Thursday. When air traffic control responded to the pilot's emergency mayday call, 'there was no response', said Samir Kumar Sinha, secretary for India's aviation ministry. He said the plane went down seconds later.Civil Aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said that the flight data recorder- an equipment that preserves the recent history of the flight, was recovered on Friday afternoon.But the cockpit voice recorder is yet to be recovered. The two units, painted orange, are designed to survive extreme conditions for facilitating investigations of accidents.
The Centre is looking to overhaul its aviation safety policy, following a crash of Air India's Boeing 787 plane killing over 250 people. The government has formed a committee headed by the home secretary. The Committee will examine the existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and to prevent and handle such occurrences and suggest steps to prevent such accidents in the future, Union Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu said on Saturday. This is besides the investigation that the statutory body Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) will conduct."This marks an important step forward in the investigation. This will significantly aid the inquiry into the incident,' Naidu said.
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