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Aircraft manufacturer Boeing today said it is going to focus all its energy to further improve the reliability of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Dinesh Keskar, senior vice-president (sales, Asia-Pacific and India), Boeing said, “W are going to focus all our energy to make things right. We have a team in place here which monitors the operations and we are in touch with them. We develop plans together as to how we are going to fix it and I think we are already in that mode.”
“Today, worldwide we are at 97 per cent reliability. We are not pleased with that, we will improve that and we will put resource to do that and Air India is no exception”, he added. He clarified that it is a safe airplane and has never caused concern as relates to the safety of passengers.
The Dreamliner has been facing technical glitches, which started with cases of its battery catching fire in January forcing airlines across the world, including Air India, to ground their entire fleet of the aircraft for a few months.
More recently on October 12, a panel fell off an Air India Delhi-Bangalore Dreamliner. The panel fell off as the plane from Delhi was landing at the Bangalore airport. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, along with Boeing and Air India, is probing the incident.
Keskar clarified that there had been misinformation about the incident. “The probe by DGCA is on and we would not be able to say anything till the report is out. But I would like to make three things clear. First, the panel fell off at Bangalore airport. Second, the panel has been recovered and, third, it never put the lives of passengers or the aircraft at risk as it was an access panel and not a pressurized one," he said.
He added that they were in constant touch with Air India, and have even deputed officials from the company as well as from the vendors to help it in case of such incidents. “We have an operations control centre in Seattle which monitors every 787 aircraft in flight and we get to know about what is happening to every 787 in flight,” he said. Air India has ordered 27 Boeing 787 aircraft, of which it has received nine. The tenth aircraft is likely to arrive in India in the first week of the November.
Separately, Keskar informed the maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) facility at Nagpur, which is coming up in collaboration with Air India, would become operational by the second quarter of next year. The contractor for the project Larsen and Toubro (L&T) is likely to hand over the facility by the end of this quarter or the first quarter of next year.
Upon commissioning of the equipment and machinery for the facility and after having tested the same, the MRO would become operational following a DGCA clearance.
The $100 million project is being set up as part of an agreement between Air India and Boeing after an order for 737s and 787s Dreamliners was placed by Air India in January 2006. The facility would also be offering its services to other carriers operating Boeingaircraft, like Jet Airways and SpiceJet.
The MRO would have two hangars and be equipped to carry out maintenance and overhauling services for around 300 aircraft per annum.
