Harriet Baskas

Special for USA TODAY

For the third time this month, a rat spotting has disrupted a flight on an Air India Dreamliner.

The most recent incident took place last Saturday, the Times of India reported, when a rat was spotted six hours into a 787 flight from Melbourne to Delhi. The plane was diverted to Singapore and alternate plans were made for getting passengers to Delhi.

A rat — possibly the same rat — was reported on the same aircraft two weeks ago on an Air India flight from Birmingham to Delhi, and on April 11 during boarding for a flight from Delhi to Frankfurt.

After those two sightings, the airplane “was fumigated, laid with rat traps and locked up for several hours,” a source told the Times of India.

With a third rat sighting on the same plane this month, the chairman of the government-owned airline stepped in, conducting an inspection of the facilities at Delhi airport and the lift trucks used by the catering companies servicing the airplanes, the Business Standard reported.

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Air India chairman Ashwani Lohani said airline workers would no longer be allowed to eat meals in areas where aircraft are parked and that the airport had been asked to set space aside for a staff canteen.

This month’s rat-on-a-plane sightings are not the first for Air India. In late December 2015, a flight to London returned to Mumbai after passengers spotted a rat on board, The Guardian reported. And the BBC reported that a rodent sighting caused the return of a flight heading to Milan from New Delhi last July.

Harriet Baskas is a Seattle-based airports and aviation writer and USA TODAY Travel's "At the Airport" columnist. She occasionally contributes to Ben Mutzabaugh's Today in the Sky blog. Follow her at twitter.com/hbaskas.