INDIA’S civil aviation authorities are awaiting safety report from Boeing after two leading airlines from Japan grounded Dreamliners their fleets of 787 on Wednesday (January 15). In Asia, only the Japanese and Air India have the Dreamliner in service, but other airlines are among those globally to have ordered around 850 of the new aircraft.
The safety report from Boeing is expected later on Wednesday (January 16), before deciding whether to ground the 6 Dreamliners operated by state-owned Air India. “We have formed a small team and are having discussions with Boeing as well as Air India, and working out the basic problems to the basic electrical systems, and then we’ll take a final call on this,” Arun Mishra, Director General of Civil Aviation told reporters.
All Nippon Airways Co said instruments aboard a domestic flight indicated a battery error, triggering emergency warnings to the pilots. Shigeru Takano, a senior safety official at the Civil Aviation Bureau, said a second warning light indicated smoke.
United Airlines, the only US carrier now flying the 787, said it was not taking any immediate action in response to the latest incident. “We are looking at what is happening and we will have more information tomorrow,” a spokeswoman said.
The Dreamliner’s problems echo those of rival Airbus, which a year ago survived a crisis of public confidence after a series of incidents with wing cracks on its A380, the world’s largest passenger jet. Those problems tested the manufacturer’s relations with airlines, but no plane orders were cancelled.
Japan’s transport minister on Tuesday (January 15) acknowledged that passenger confidence in the Dreamliner was at stake, as both Japan and the US have opened broad and open-ended investigations into the plane after the recent incidents.
The 787 is Boeing’s first new jet in more than a decade, and the company’s financial fortunes are largely tied to its success. The plane offers airlines unprecedented fuel economy, but the huge investment to develop it coupled with years of delay in delivery has caused headaches for customers, hurt Boeing financially, and created a delivery bottleneck.
Boeing has said it will at least break even on the cost of building the 1,100 new 787s it expects to deliver over the next decade. Some analysts, however, say Boeing may never make money from the plane, given its enormous development cost.
Any additional cost from fixing problems discovered by the string of recent incidents would affect those forecasts, and could hit Boeing’s bottom line more quickly if it has to stop delivering planes, analysts said.
