Shafaqna India: Air India will replace and send the impacted fuel control switch (FCS) module from its Boeing 787 aircraft operating flight AI132 to Boeing for detailed inspection, even as fresh disclosures show the component had completed less than 20 per cent of its certified service life, sources said on Tuesday, adding that over half of Air India’s 787 fleet had been inspected and nothing suspicious was found.
Sources said the component in question had logged only 3,440 hours against a total certified life of 20,000 hours when the defect was reported. “The issue is with a specific component, not the aircraft. The component will be changed on the aircraft and sent to the OEM for further checks,” they said.
The development comes a day after Air India grounded the aircraft and reported the matter to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), following concerns flagged by a pilot over the fuel control switch, a critical engine control, on a Boeing 787 operating the London-Bengaluru sector.
In an internal memo to pilots operating Boeing 787 aircraft, Air India’s senior vice-president for flight operations Manish Uppal said they had escalated the matter to Boeing for “priority evaluation” and had initiated precautionary fleet-wide re-inspection of the fuel control switch latch.
“In the interim, while we await Boeing’s response, our engineers — out of abundance of caution — have initiated precautionary fleet-wide re-inspection of the fuel control switch (FCS) latch to verify normal operations. To date, no adverse findings have been reported on the aircraft for which this re-inspection is completed,” Uppal said, according to the memo accessed by The Tribune.