Mid-Air Scare: Within Minutes of Takeoff, Air India Dreamliner Returns to Hong-Kong Due to Technical Snag

The safety checks are being done following a directive from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation post the Ahmedabad crash.

Within days of Air India flight AI171 crashing in Ahmedabad killing over 270 people including 241 who were on board, an Air India flight A1315 that took off from Hong Kong for Delhi had to return to Hong Kong within minutes of takeoff after the pilot detected technical glitches mid air.

The aircraft landed safely in Hong Kong but the nature of the technical snag is still not known.

This flight too was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner same as the Air India flight AI171.

Post the crash of the Ahmedabad-London flight on June 12, Boeing’s Dreamliner 787 has been under the scanner.

According to a report published by The American Prospect on June 13 and reproduced in The Wire on June 14, Boeing whistleblowers including John Barnett, who was found dead last year, had raised specific concerns about the Dreamliner because of cost and quality cuts that the Boeing management was allegedly imposing on manufacturing. One of the big problems they have raised is the existence of ‘foreign object debris’ – things left inside the aircraft during production because manufacturers are in too much of a hurry to clean up after they are done.

This debris is often not visible unless you’re looking inside the engine or other hidden parts of the aircraft. A Norwegian airline had claimed in 2020 that it had to replace engines on its 787 Dreamliner and 737 Max planes hundreds of times because of complications caused by foreign object debris. The 787s delivered to them “suffer from extraordinary defects and are the product of shoddy manufacturing”, Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA and Arctic Aviation Assets DAC said in a lawsuit against Boeing, The Wire report said.

Meanwhile, Air India has incpected 22 of the 34 Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircrafts and said nothing alarming was found, a The Mint report said.

The safety checks are being done following a directive from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation post the Ahmedabad crash.

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