An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner en route from Melbourne, Australia, to Delhi, India, had to make an emergency landing in KLIA after all three of its navigation computers failed at the same time.
Flight AI 301 was carrying 231 onboard, including 18 crewmembers, when it landed in Kuala Lumpur. The landing went off safely but all passengers remain stranded in KL.
The same Dreamliner jet was grounded last year when its windshield cracked after touching down in Delhi. Subsequent examinations revealed the plane also had a badly damaged landing gear door.
In November of last year, the jet had its windshield cracked again while landing in Melbourne, making it the sixth such incident for the Air India Dreamliner fleet in three months.
Aviation records show that windshield cracks occur most often in aircraft that are more than 4 to 5 years old.
The Boeing Dreamliner was thrust into controversy in October when an Air India flight from Delhi to Bangalore, carrying 150 passengers and crew, had a large panel of its undercarriage breaking off during the flight, exposing critical components to the elements.
Today, an Air India official said the airline was doing its best to accommodate passengers and was ”rushing engineers and technical equipment to Kuala Lumpur”.
”Passengers are being taken care of there and those who have to rush to Delhi are being accommodated on other airlines,” he said.
The spokesman also said the failure of the navigation computers does not render an aircraft incapacitated or pose an immediate safety threat, but severely degrades its capabilities to perform long haul flights.
In this instance, the navigation computer failure prompted the jet to be taken completely off auto pilot, with the pilots required to manually fky the plane and divert the aircraft to the nearest airport.
Photo: James Morgan
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
