In yet another incident of aircraft glitch, an Air India Boeing flight was diverted to Mumbai after an incident of a loss in cabin pressure was reported by the pilot-in-command.
The Dubai-Kochi flight (AI- 934) landed safely in Mumbai.
Following the incident, aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) assigned two senior officers to carry out a preliminary investigation into the matter. The aircraft, B787 Boeing fleet, has also been grounded by the DGCA and the flight crew derostered.
“We are grounding the #AirIndiaBoeing Fleet B787 Aircraft and off-rostering the flight crew,” DGCA official said.
There have been multiple incidents of airlines reporting technical malfunction in the last one month prompting DGCA to conduct spot checks earlier this week. On Sunday last week, IndiGo’s Sharjah-Hyderabad flight was diverted to Karachi as a precautionary measure after pilots observed a defect in one of the engines.
Last week on Saturday night, the Calicut-Dubai flight of the Air India Express was diverted to Muscat after a burning smell was observed in the cabin mid-air. A day earlier a bird, which was alive, was found in the cockpit of the Air India Express Bahrain-Kochi flight.
SpiceJet is under a regulatory scanner right now. On July 6, the DGCA issued a show-cause notice to SpiceJet following at least eight incidents of technical malfunction in its aircraft since June 19. The DGCA is currently investigating all these incidents.
The DGCA had on Monday this week conducted spot checks and found that there is an insufficient number of engineering personnel certifying planes of various carriers before their departure.
Before each departure, an aircraft is checked and certified by an aircraft maintenance engineer (AME). The DGCA has issued guidelines for airlines on the deployment of AME personnel and directed them to comply by July 28.
The spot checks also found that the AME teams of airlines are improperly identifying the “cause of a reported defect”, the DGCA order noted. They also found that there has been an “increasing trend of MEL (minimum equipment list) releases” of aircraft, it said.