Air India's Dreamliners back in the air from today

New Delhi: Air India will begin flying the Dreamliners again today, when two commercial flights are scheduled between Delhi-Kolkata and Delhi-Bengaluru.

The Kolkata bound flight will have all the members of Air India’s board of directors on board, in what is being seen as a confidence building measure for generating buzz around the beleagured Dreamliners. Air India’s Chairman and MD Rohit Nandan said the entire board would be on the Kolkata flight and Secretary Civil Aviation may take the flight to Bengaluru.

[caption id=“attachment_780759” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Air India needs to instill confidence in its passengers about the safety and efficacy of the Dreamliners. AFP[/caption]

Air India needs to instill confidence in its passengers about the safety and efficacy of the Dreamliners, on which a lot is riding for the loss making airline. It had grounded all six Dreamliners in its fleet in January after a battery glitch forced FAA to ground these jumbos worldwide. Since then, Boeing has been installing new batteries and making each aircraft airworthy. Now that the first two jumbos are ready for a commercial flight, the top management of AI will itself be on board to give out a message to passengers about the aircraft’s safety.

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Since January, Air India has been incurring losses of Rs 20 crore a week due to grounding of the six Dreamliners and also had to implement a major restructuring of its fleet utilisation. AI is the only customer in India to have ordered and received 6 B787s till now. It was scheduled to receive two more by March this year besides another 6 till March 2014. So in all, as per the original delivery plan, the airline would have had 14 Dreamliners in its fleet by March next year. Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh said today the airline will have a fleet of 14 Dreamliners, as scheduled, by December.

Air India is seeking a hefty compensation from Boeing Co for the grounding but has not specified how much. Some of it could be adjusted against future orders but no decision has yet been taken on how much compensation will be sought and in which form.

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When the Dreammliners were grounded in January, the Mumbai-Singapore and Chennai-Singapore flights of Air India has been combined and were being operated on an Airbus 330. “This means the Mumbai passengers to Singapore have to stop at Chennai, which many do not like. But we were left with no other option,” an airline official had said at that time. Also, AI had to cancel its five-times-a-week service between Delhi and Narita airport in Tokyo because of Dreamliners’ grounding. But it has continued to serve the two overseas destinations of B787s by deploying B 777LRs on Paris and Frankfurt legs.

On Tuesday, aviation minister Ajit Singh said Air India will resume international flights on the Dreamliners by May 22. The Delhi-Birmingham-Delhi and Delhi-Sydney/Melbourne-Delhi flights will begin by August; Delhi-Rome/Milan/Delhi by October and Delhi-Moscow/Delhi by early next year. This means new destinations on Air India map would be flights into Australia (no Indian airline currently operates direct flights into Australia), Italy and Russia.

A prolonged grounding of the Dreamliners - which were seen as the backbone of Air India’s turnaround plan - has only meant bad news for the loss making national carrier. Now that they are back in air, perhaps confidence building will need to be assisted by heavy advertising for passenger numbers on these aircraft to swell.