Technical snag grounds Air India Dreamliner in Paris

236 stranded passengers to be brought to Delhi today in a scheduled flight

As many as 236 passengers were stranded in Paris following a Paris-New Delhi flight was cancelled due to technical snags on Saturday night. Air India will bring to Delhi the stranded passengers on Monday morning in a scheduled flight.

Air India's flight AI 142, operated by a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, had to be grounded as it was to take off from Paris CDG Airport on Saturday night following malfunctioning of the “spoilers on the aircraft. Spoilers are speed retardation devices on the wings that move up and down.

“The stranded passengers have been sent to hotels and will be flown to Delhi on Monday morning,” said an official in Air India.

This is the second time technical snags have surfaced in Dreamliners spoilers. In February, a Delhi-Frankfurt flight had to be cancelled due to spoiler trouble.

Air India chairman and managing director Rohit Nandan had said on Wednesday that there were no plans to ground the Boeing 787 Dreamliner as the fleet was doing well and there were no safety concerns attached with them. The Boeing and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) have looked into every fleet incident reported in the past 18 months and said there were no safety issues involved, Nandan had said.

“The incidents being reported are usual in a new aircraft and everyone was trying to adjust to the new machine. These relate to minor software-related issues or some small technical snags. However, we are quite satisfied with the quality of service, the fleet's economics among others," he had said, while speaking to reporters on the sidelines of fourth India Aviation 2014 in Hyderabad.

Air India has 13 Dreamliners and it has put these on routes to London, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Osaka and Sydney-Melbourne. It also uses Dreamliners for flights to Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore.

However, a series of technical glitches in the 787s — cracks on windshields, over-heating of ovens on-board, fuselage falling off — have raised concern.

According to official data, as many as 136 technical glitches were recorded in the aircraft between September 2012 and November 2013. None of these led to any safety issues, though.

According to sources, Nandan has taken up the issue of technical glitches in the 787s sternly with Boeing, asking them to station dedicated personnel in India to explain and rectify every fault that has surfaced in the aircraft.