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NEW DELHI: Boeing’s snag-ridden Dreamliner is now giving a taste of its vagaries to the top VVIPs of India. Last Sunday (July 12), former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flew from Amritsar to Delhi on a schedule flight of Air India on a Boeing-787 along with other passengers that had all its wheels jutting out throughout the flight!

Ironically, the trouble with landing gear retraction happened on AI’s newest Dreamliner (VT-ANV) that had joined its fleet only last month. Shortly after take off, the pilot of AI 113 realized that the landing gear had a snag and the wheels were not retracting.

According to senior pilots, such an aircraft cannot be taken to higher altitude of beyond 20,000 feet as the landing gear out means the cabin pressurization and effectiveness of ACs is way below desired level — making the flight very uncomfortable for passengers. Also, "wheels out" means that drag on the plane increases significantly that leads to a spike in fuel burn.

"In normal circumstances, such an aircraft does a ’gear down ferry’ — usually — without passengers as the plane has to be filled with fuel to reach its engineering base. If such an issue happens in a hilly terrain like while flying out of Srinagar, then the plane has to immediately return to the origin," said a senior commander.

The AI commander last Sunday decided to fly on to Delhi as it is a short flying time away from Amritsar (under 45 minutes) and the flight was being operated on the big aircraft like the Dreamliner that has fuel tank capacity for up to 9 hour long flights.

"Returning to Amritsar would have meant landing there too and then the plane getting grounded there. So the crew decided to fly to Delhi, which is AI’s engineering base where the plane could have been repaired," said a source. Having a VVIP on board may have been another factor for flying on to the destination.

An AI spokesman confirmed the incident, saying: "After take-off from Amritsar, the pilot noticed a ’gear disagree’ message of the left landing gear. Operations procedure as per checklist was followed by crew and aircraft landed safely without any problem in Delhi."

"After that, as suggested by Boeing, ’drag brace actuator’ was replaced and aircraft has been operating without any problem since then. There was no snag in the previous sector, Delhi-Amritsar. The aircraft had just flown 23 hours then," he added.

AI, like most airlines globally operating the Dreamliner, has been repeatedly taking up the issue of snags on this aircraft with Boeing. The US aircraft major keeps carrying out upgrades on its earliest Dreamliners. As the second airline to get this aircraft, AI has a number of first generation Dreamliners that have been upgraded.

Boeing says that its newest B-787s will not face issues like the earliest ones. But the Amritsar-Delhi flight shows it still has a long way to go for improving the technical reliability of this aircraft.