Fault Lines at the Maharaja: Air India’s Week of Failures

London Letter

By Shyam Bhatia

The month of October, by any measure, has been a grim period for India’s flagship carrier. In the space of seven days Air India moved from awkward explanations to passenger outrage — and regulatory scrutiny — leaving a simple question: can a carrier that talks up global standards still be trusted when machines and maintenance appear to conspire against it?

The headlines began with a curious technical incident on 4 October. As a Boeing 787 on approach to Birmingham, the aircraft’s Ram Air Turbine (RAT) — a tiny windmill that swings out only when primary power is lost — unexpectedly deployed. The pilots found every instrument normal and landed safely, but the deployment was labelled “uncommanded” by the airline and prompted the Indian regulator to ask Boeing for answers. Aviation trackers and industry sites recorded the event; the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has since asked operators to re-inspect 787 RAT mechanisms.

Boeing service bulletins and airline maintenance checks tend to focus on fault trees and Bus Power Control Units — precise, narrow fixes — but they rarely satisfy public appetite for transparency. Pic – Getty Images

Two days later, dozens of Diwali travellers were stranded in Milan when a 787 (VT-ANN) scheduled to return to Delhi was taken out of service for an “extended technical requirement.” Hundreds were rehoused; one passenger with a rapidly expiring Schengen visa was hurried onto another carrier. Air India later scheduled a special flight to bring passengers home, but the episode fed a mounting narrative: too many wide-body Dreamliners, too little reliability.

And then came the social-media furor. A first-class passenger on the long Delhi→Toronto rotation posted photographs and a thread describing a litany of failures in the premium cabin: repeatedly malfunctioning seats, cracked panels, an overhead light that fell and cut a passenger, a USB port with a sharp edge, and — most alarming — bed-bugs allegedly present in the bedding. Air India offered a “goodwill” payment of ₹10,174 (roughly US$116) and an apology; critics were quick to ask whether that token sum was adequate compensation for what a paying first-class customer described as a safety and hygiene failure. Aviation blogs and travel sites amplified the story.

Taken separately each episode might be dismissed as a one-off: a stray sensor, an inconvenient mechanical snag, an embarrassingly small goodwill payment. Taken together, they point to a pattern that should worry flyers and shareholders alike: a fleet still absorbing the aftershocks of last summer’s safety pause; a complex, software-heavy aircraft type whose quirks are easier to see in headlines than in technical reports; and a customer-service model that sometimes answers viral outrage with token cash rather than systemic fixes.

There are two separate risk vectors here. First, the technical: modern airliners rely on layers of electronic redundancy and software logic that can, when they misbehave, produce startling and opaque results. The RAT deployment is not merely a curiosity; it is a safety system activating where no failure was recorded. Boeing service bulletins and airline maintenance checks tend to focus on fault trees and Bus Power Control Units — precise, narrow fixes — but they rarely satisfy public appetite for transparency. The DGCA’s request for information from Boeing is therefore not a bureaucratic nicety: it is a necessary step toward public assurance.

Second, the reputational: premium cabins sell more than a seat. They sell assurance, privacy and hygiene. The first-class thread exposed a chasm between marketing and reality. Whether the problem was crew-level lapses, maintenance backlogs, or a systemic failure in line-maintenance oversight, the airline’s response felt inadequate to many. In the age of social media, a token goodwill payment can look like an attempt to buy silence rather than to fix the root cause.

For Mauritius readers the practical detail is simple but relevant: the Indian-Mauritius air corridor is thinly served — the non-stop Delhi-Port Louis sector shows a single weekly non-stop service on public schedules, even as carriers juggle seasonal adjustments and codeshares. That limited capacity makes reliability on the route especially precious for Diaspora travellers heading home for festivals; poor dispatch reliability or last-minute cancellations do not merely inconvenience, they carry visa and family consequences.

Air India’s management will say that each event is being investigated, and that safety is the company’s first priority. That is the obligatory line of every airline faced with embarrassment. But regulators and the flying public will want something more: clearer, faster disclosures from the DGCA; meaningful corrective action from Boeing and the operator; and compensation that recognises harm rather than papering it over.

If Air India hopes to be a true global Maharaja, it must show that its golden crown is not merely cosmetic. Machines that “act on their own” are both a design problem and a test of institutional candour. Until the airline and its regulator answer plainly, passengers will be left to wonder who, in a cabin of software, hardware and human crews, is actually in command.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 24 October 2025