Air India crash latest: Flights cancelled as Dreamliners face scrutiny days after tragedy that killed 270 – UK Times

India’s aviation regulator, the DGCA, found no major safety flaws in Air India’s Dreamliner fleet after inspecting 24 aircraft, offering some relief amid post-crash scrutiny.

However, it flagged ongoing issues with spare-part delays and poor coordination between departments, warning these could affect reliability.

Despite the concerns, all inspected planes met current safety standards.

Following the crash, India’s civil aviation minister had ordered extended inspections of all 33 Boeing 787s in the Indian fleet.

India’s aviation regulator, the DGCA, has requested detailed training records for the pilots and dispatcher of the Air India Dreamliner that crashed last week, killing more than 270 people.

The move is part of a broader investigation into the tragedy, led by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB).

The DGCA also asked flying schools nationwide to carry out compliance checks on safety procedures, training, and coordination, and told airports to hold full-scale emergency drills by 30 June, according to Reuters, which cited a confidential memo seen by them.

While no specific concerns have been raised about Air India’s operations yet, the requests are standard post-crash procedures.

Air India has cancelled or delayed multiple international flights operated by Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners following last week’s deadly crash that killed more than 270 people.

Several international routes – among them London, Paris, Vienna, and Dubai – were disrupted on Tuesday as Air India halted operations on multiple flights.

The airline attributed the interruptions to a mix of factors: grounded aircraft, technical issues, restricted airspace, and heightened safety protocols.

In the past two days alone, at least three more Dreamliner flights have either been delayed or taken out of service amid intensified inspections mandated by India’s aviation authority, which is scrutinising all 33 of Air India’s Dreamliners.

A Boeing 777 on the San Francisco–Mumbai route was also sidelined due to a mechanical fault.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was in seat 11A near the emergency exit, and managed to escape through the broken hatch. He was filmed after Thursday’s disaster limping along the street in a bloodstained T-shirt with bruises on his face.

As extraordinary as it seems, the 40-year-old Briton’s miraculous escape isn’t the first story of a sole air-crash survivor. Dozens of stories have been shared from as far back as 1929, when 34-year-old Lou Foote survived a crash that killed 14 others in Newark, New Jersey.

Here, senior reporter Alex Ross takes a look at six survivor stories.

Thousands of people have been left in mourning after the Air India plane disaster claimed more than 240 lives on Thursday.

But one north-west London community, some 4,000 miles away from the Ahmedabad crash site, is feeling the impact more than most.

Twenty of the victims have connections to the same temple in Harrow, its leader has said, with multiple families now trying to come to terms with what has happened. Among those killed in the Dreamliner disaster are a mother and father who lost their son, a pilot, in a plane crash in France just a few years ago.

India’s aviation safety watchdog said on Tuesday surveillance conducted on Air India’s Boeing 787 fleet did not reveal any major safety concerns, days after one of its jets crashed, killing at least 271 people.

“The aircraft and associated maintenance systems were found to be compliant with existing safety standards,” the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said in a statement.

The DGCA also said 24 of Air India’s 33 Boeing 787 aircraft had completed an “enhanced safety inspection” it had ordered the airline to carry out.

The regulator, in a meeting with senior officials of Air India, raised concerns about recent maintenance-related issues reported by the airline.

It advised the carrier to “strictly adhere to regulations”, strengthen coordination across its businesses and ensure availability of adequate spares to mitigate passenger delays, it added.

Aurobindo Handa, former director general of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, has said the investigation into last week’s crash would likely be a long process as the aircraft was badly charred.

He added that ascertaining the condition of the black boxes recovered from the crash site was vital as the heat generated from the crash could be possibly higher than the bearable threshold of the device.

Amit Singh, a former pilot and an aviation expert, said the recovery of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes, are crucial to piece together the sequence of events that led up to the crash of the Air India flight.

The cockpit voice recorder records pilots’ conversation, emergency alarms and any distress signal made before a crash.

The plane’s digital flight data recorder stores information related to engine and control settings. Both devices are designed to survive a crash.

“The data will reveal everything,” Singh said.

He added that the technical details could be corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder that would help investigators know of any communication between air traffic control and the pilots.