New Delhi: A longhaul Delhi-Chicago flight of Air India had to return to Delhi from Central Asia on Sunday, as the Boeing 777 was reportedly burning too much of fuel.
The flight carrying 184 passengers took off from Delhi at around 4:30 AM and returned from halfway at around 10:30 AM.
As reported by Times of India daily, an AI official said, “The pilot saw that the aircraft was losing fuel fast and at 7.30am (after flying for almost three hours), he decided to return to Delhi. The aircraft landed here safely at 10.30 am.”
The cause of burning fuel so fast by the aircraft has yet not been ascertained by the safety regulator.
It is speculated that either it may have been a case of fuel leak or the aircraft might have been overloaded. Both the possibilities are being investigated as of now.
Reportedly, several such cases of AI flights being grounded due to technical issues have been reported in the past few weeks.
In addition to this, the airline service is also facing shortage of cabin crew members which is another cause of delay of its flights.
According to media reports, AI has 3000 cabin crew on paper. Some of them are known to be on medical leave, while some others have not turned up since a long time and the few more are done with their limit of maximum 1000 flying hours permitted in a year.
It is known that many of the crew members on contract do not extend their contract as they get better opportunities elsewhere.
Considering all this, currently, AI has a shortage of around 300 cabin crew members at any given time.
A similar shortage is expected to be faced by AI for pilots and aircrafts too.
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