A Delhi-bound Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flight was forced to turn back to Hong Kong on Monday after the pilot reported technical issues mid-air.
The Air India flight AI 315 departed from the Asian city at 11.59 am local time for its scheduled destination in New Delhi. It reached an altitude of 22,000 feet, and then started descending, according to the flight tracking website AirNav Radar. The plane was 7 years old. Officials said the aircraft landed safely back in Hong Kong around 3.20 pm local time.
AI315 “returned to Hong Kong shortly after take-off due to a technical issue. The flight landed safely ... and is undergoing checks as a matter of abundant precaution,” Air India said in a statement.
It comes just days after a Boeing Dreamliner bound for Gatwick with 242 people erupted in a fireball in Gujarat in the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade.
The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner struck a medical college hostel in a residential area of the northwestern city of Ahmedabad minutes after takeoff on Thursday. One passenger survived.
There were 230 passengers and 12 crew members onboard the aircraft. They included 169 Indian nationals, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese citizens and one Canadian, Air India said.
Air India officials and scores of Indian government investigators have been at the crash site since Thursday.
No initial findings have been disclosed so far, but investigators are considering at least three key possible issues, a source with direct knowledge told Reuters.
India’s aviation regulator on Friday ordered all Boeing 787s being operated by local carriers to be inspected following the crash.
Eight of the 34 Dreamliners in India have already undergone inspection, minister of civil aviation Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said, adding that the remaining aircraft will be examined with “immediate urgency”.
Meanwhile, the final words of the pilot on flight AI171 that crashed on Thursday have been revealed, providing new details about the final moments before the aircraft went down.
“Thrust not achieved... falling... Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” the pilot said moments before the aircraft began losing height and erupted in a fireball.
On Friday, investigators recovered the 12-year-old plane’s digital flight data recorder, the black box, from a rooftop near the crash site.
There are currently around 1,200 787 Dreamliner aircraft worldwide, and this was the first fatal crash in 16 years of operation, according to experts.
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