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After a series of other issues with the Dreamliner, Air India had to ground one of its crafts due to toilet-issues. The replacement Dreamliner responded with technical issues, leaving many of the passengers stuck overnight.

From NDTV:

Air India’s spate of trouble with its Dreamliner fleet continued on Friday as the airline was forced to cancel its Melbourne-Delhi flight and delay the departure of its Singapore-Chennai service by over six hours. While the Melbourne-Delhi flight AI-301 had clogged toilets in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and had to be grounded at the Australian city, the other aircraft of the same make, operating flight AI-347 developed technical trouble at Singapore and reached Chennai on Saturday evening, instead of its scheduled arrival time of 10.50 am, airline sources said.

This whole incident happened right after an Air India flight (Delhi-London) had to turn back three hours in because the Dreamliner’s A/C system went out.

The Dreamliner has been seriously affecting Air India’s operations.

This Scroll.in article details the numerous and diverse ways the Dreamliner has been acting up.

And as for the operations:

In a written reply to Parliament last week, aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said that Air India’s Dreamliner fleet had 9,902 successful takeoffs till June 2014. Crucially, he said that as many as 318 of these flights faced “service delays attributed to technical snags”. That is about one incident for every 31 flights.



With Air India mounting over Rs 3,159 crore worth of losses, it seems the troubles won’t be ending anytime soon. There may be some good news at the end of the tunnel though. After eight long years and a host of hurdles along the way, Air India has finally joined the prestigious Star Alliance, the world’s largest global airline alliance. Air India will have to live up to even greater standards than it has been used to and this may be a struggle.

Qantas had cancelled its order for 35 Dreamliners in 2012 after lots of delays. Looks like that may have been a good call.

This isn’t the most interesting story of Air India’s to hit the news lately, though.

An Air India pilot locked himself out of the cockpit when he ran for a bathroom break.

Two pilots tricked the flight attendants into flying the plane while they napped–and then the auto-pilot shut off.