Glitches just don't end? Standby jet ferries PM Modi to Canada as Air India One flops

There seems to be no end to technical glitches faced by national carrier Air India and the latest victim of these ‘glitches’ was the Prime Minister of India. Air India One, a Boeing 747-400 aircraft carrying Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Delhi to Berlin after halts at Paris, Toulouse and Hannover, developed a technical snag and had to replaced by another plane. The standby plane in Mumbai, left early Tuesday morning for Berlin and was used for flying the Prime Minister and his entourage to Ottawa in Canada on the last leg of his three-nation tour. Air India also sent some additional cabin crew along with the aircraft. “We got a message last evening and without any delay the stand-by Air India One plane was dispatched from Mumbai to Berlin early Tuesday,” an AI official was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times. [caption id=“attachment_2197272” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Modi’s instagram account[/caption] The glitch was noticed as Air India One was flying from France to Germany, but the exact details of the technical snag are not known, though some reports late Tuesday said it was an “engine problem”. As part of the protocol, the national carrier keeps one of its jumbo aircraft on standby mode for such situations, they said. The Prime Minister had left Delhi for Paris on April 9 and is scheduled to return here on the morning of April 18. India currently has five Boeing 747s to fly the president and the prime minister. But all five aircraft are ageing. In fact given that these aircraft are around 20 years old, the government is replacing them with the ultra-long haul 777-300 as the Prime Minister’s Air India One fleet. “An in-principle decision has been taken to transfer two B777s to the VIP fleet,” an AI spokesperson told HT. The government is likely to buy out the two planes from Air India but would require modifications  according to VIP requirements. And not just the Air India One, Air India’s fleet of A320s are among the oldest in the world. Last month an Air India pilot union even voiced its concern over the 26-year-old fleet of Airbus A320s  and sought grounding of these planes from aviation regulator DGCA. The Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), which represents erstwhile Indian Airlines pilots in the now combined entity Air India, has said the airline continues to fly Airbus A320s even after snags being reported regularly. “The classic A-320 aircrafts which are 26 years old (one of the oldest in the world) are being operated with repetitive snags endangering flight safety… DGCA should not permit AI to operate these lethal snag-prone classic aircrafts in lieu of passenger safety,” ICPA stated in a letter to the DGCA in March. The ICPA letter comes in the backdrop of a 24-year old Airbus A230 plane, operated by Lufthansa’s budget arm Germanwings, crashing into a mountainside in the French Alps last week, killing all 150 people on board. In December 2013  Boeing had even sought to set right the continued glitches in the operation of the state-of-the-art B-787 Dreamliner aircraft being flown by Air India on domestic and international routes. The Dreamliner fleet that the national carrier possesses was faced with recurring issues totaling around 136 minor technical problems in 2013. And now the national carrier. In February 2014,  a flight from Melbourne to Delhi was diverted to Kuala Lumpur after all three of the jet’s navigation computers failed simultaneously. Two other planes had cracked windshields within a month of deployment – windshield cracks typically occur in planes that are more than 4-5 years old. However, in October 2014, the national carrier was forced to cancel its Melbourne-Delhi flight due to clogged toilets of the Dreamliner plane while its Singapore-Chennai flight was delayed by over six hours as another Dreamliner could not take off after engineers detected a technical problem. Another flight in the same month from Delhi to London had to return to the national capital due to problems with its airconditioning system after three hours. Another Dreamliner developed a crack in the windshield and had to be grounded days after. Such glitches have meant it affects its on-time performance. But despite this, Air India is going ahead and  purchasing the  remaining seven Boeing 787 (Dreamliners) from the original order of 27 Dreamliners, placed to Boeing in 2006, by 2016-17.