As Snags Mount, Air India Must Share Crash Findings At The Earliest
The Air India plane crash has triggered all sorts of panic, and the news about several cancellations by the airline isn't helping its cause. While rumours and theories are flying thick and fast, it would help if Air India maintained as much transparency as possible.
On Tuesday, Air India cancelled a staggering seven international long-haul flights to and from destinations like London, Paris and Vienna.
Of the flights halted, six were Dreamliner aircraft. According to The Economic Times, one of the flights was “non-operating”. This means that it would likely operate at some point, unlike the cancelled ones that had been cancelled and taken off schedule.
A spate of cancellations, attributed mostly to technical snags and safety checks, is worrying for a slightly different reason.
These cancellations come days after the crash of Air India’s Ahmedabad to London Boeing Dreamliner on June 12, which killed all on board except for one lone survivor and many on the ground as well.
Heightened Caution
Pilots I spoke to say the reason for such technical snags is not that they all happened on that day, being Tuesday, but aircraft engineers are now refusing to certify aircraft for use due to issues which they may have earlier overlooked.
This is, of course, one side of the story, but it does seem statistically unusual that so many technical snags would surface on a single day for the same or similar aircraft.
Or a spate of safety checks, which sounds fair but would also suggest they were not happening otherwise or to the degree required.
A snag can be, of course, broad. For instance, a non-functioning lavatory is a snag that engineers might let go for repair at the home base or the onward station. But now, that might not be the case.
Call For Transparency
Whatever the nature of the snags is, Air India would do well to be transparent about them and keep the travelling public informed in time.
Speaking of transparency, while reports from air crashes do take time to compile, with final reports sometimes taking months or more than a year, it is imperative to share early official findings as soon as possible.
Search For Answers
The families of passengers on the ill-fated aircraft and those who died on the ground in Ahmedabad on June 12 will want to know what caused the Boeing Dreamliner to fall out of the sky moments after it began rolling down the runway.
As would anyone who is catching a flight in the coming days, including on Air India.
Speaking of Dreamliners, there is no conclusive evidence or insight yet on what really caused the aircraft’s twin engines to fail that day as it took off from Ahmedabad airport, except to note that they inexplicably did.
This has never happened before, at least to this aircraft. There are some 1,100 Dreamliners in service across the world as we speak, undertaking daily flights.
All the pilots who fly similar wide-body aircraft who have been opining on this issue have been eliminating various probable causes, but are still unable to satisfactorily explain why the engines would stop so suddenly.
And it’s not just in India but the global aviation fraternity, from aircraft makers and airlines to crew and, of course, passengers, who are waiting for answers.
Not surprisingly, speculation is at a fevered pitch right now. And an information vacuum at any point in the operational chain will only feed the speculation, whether it be small snags or the crash itself.
The bottom line — please don’t believe the conspiracy theories doing the rounds, and do wait for some official findings to emerge and not let speculation carry the day.
