Podcast: Air India Crash Spotlights MRO Response To Accidents

James Pozzi (00:16): So welcome to the MRO podcast. I'm James Pozzi, MRO editor for the EMEA Region, and today we are going to be primarily looking at recent developments related to the crash of Air India Flight AI171 early this month. Of course, on June 12, the Air India flight, a Boeing 787 aircraft, which set out on its journey from Ahmedabad Airport scheduled for London Gatwick crashed very shortly after taking off, and the flight was carrying 242 individuals–230 passengers, two pilots and 10 crew members, and there were multiple fatalities reported on the ground, notably at a nearby medical college. So in the two-and-a-bit weeks since, there's still a relative lack of information regarding the cause of the crash. India, of course, has taken a cautious approach to its handling of this tragedy. But today we can look at the action so far of Air India and India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation, that's the DGCA regulator, and of course delve into the wider Boeing 787 fleet. So joining me today, first is Sean Broderick, who is safety editor for Aviation Week. Sean has covered much of the Air India story to date and has filed on that quite extensively for Aviation Week. So he's on top of that. Sean, welcome.

Sean Broderick (01:34): It is good to be here, although not necessarily under these particular circumstances.

James Pozzi (01:40): Absolutely. And also joining us today is Dan Williams, who is director of Fleet Data Services for Aviation Week Network, who I'm sure has plenty of numbers on the 787 program and some insights on that of course as well. So Dan, welcome.

Daniel Williams (01:57): Thank you for having me back. And again, I echo Sean's sentiments that it's not necessarily the nicest podcast to talk about, but obviously it is a very incredibly hot topic within our industry at the moment.

James Pozzi (02:10): Absolutely. Start with Sean then. So given what we know now in the two-and-a-bit weeks since the fatal crash, what are the checks directed by India's regulator, and which 787 aircraft are these checks applying to maybe in terms of their engines, and is the focus on aircraft engines and its systems as well? What can you tell us about what's going on there?

Sean Broderick (02:36): Sure. Well, the interesting thing of course, the reason, James, that you picked this topic for this podcast is there was some very interesting MRO ramifications almost immediately after the accident. So as we sit here, the investigation has gone, I think methodically, would be a way to at least in terms of what has been released publicly. Really not a whole lot known. But within a day after the accident, the regulator, the DGCA, issued an order for Air India to do some very specific inspections of its 787s. This is GE GEnX-powered 787s. After the accident, I believe 33 of 'em in service, including ones in heavy checks. So they targeted areas that seemed likely to potentially have some sort of connection to the accident sequence. Now everybody listening to this podcast, I'm going to make the leap that they have seen the two main videos that quickly made their rounds on social media immediately after the accident.

(03:46): One of them shows the entire 30-second flight. The airplane lifts off at the end of the runway, gets up to maybe an altitude to 400 feet or so, sort of does this arcing 30-second flight and crashes, as you said, into the medical college in a very populated area. Nothing obviously flies off the airplane. There's nothing obviously broken on the airplane. You didn't have an engine failure that we can see. You see, if you look at it, you say, okay, what could have happened based simply on the videos and the little bit of information they gleaned within a day because this order was issued on the 13th of June. So they ordered India to do the following, look at fuel parameter monitoring and associated system check. So that's going to cover a fuel system issue. Cabin air compressor and associated systems, and I'll be honest, I don't know what that covers. That's incapacitation or some issue in the cabin is the only issue I can figure there, or related electronic systems down the way once they get to that. Engine electronic control system tests, engine fuel driven actuator operational test and oil system check. Hydraulic system, and then a review of takeoff parameters, which is a very interesting one. So that one is more ‘Did you put in the correct data into the flight management system,’ the airplane weights, the temperatures, all the things that tell the airplane accurately, ‘Here's how heavy you are, here's what the temperature is, here's where we're going, here's the fuel onboard,’ all of that. So that gets into a little bit of human factors. Also, flight control inspections they want done on repeated basis and power assurance checks. That's to make sure that everything's powering up as it's supposed to. They wanted that done within two weeks. And so they wanted all of this done by, it started immediately and done within two weeks.

(05:35): So here we are two weeks later, Air India started doing this pretty quickly, and they didn't find anything. But the interesting part I thought about this is that really a day after the accident, even though you had investigators at the site, unless the sweeping nature of these shows that they were precautionary, and it says as a preventative measure, it says right on the order that these are preventative, it is not necessarily having anything to do with the accident. And that spread to Japan ordered some inspections as well. It's an interesting sort of development that I think we're seeing now, and these accidents are so rare and they're so shocking that I think regulators feel like they have to do something. Obviously didn't find a problem that's affecting every 787 because the 33 in Air India turned up clean and nothing out of Japan. Everybody over there, three carriers I think over there had to do inspections.

(06:32): But there was an interesting sort of development that is a pattern. It's similar with the 737 MAX. If you remember the cascading groundings of the MAX, China grounded it immediately. I mean they had no idea what was going on, but they grounded it. Turned out they were right, but they had no idea what was going on. This reaction here, we'll see, we still don't know. Flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder, just being read out. Hopefully we'll get some more information here in a few days. But these were clearly based on, I don't want to say hunches, that sounds too glib. That's not giving enough credit to the regulator, but this was based on, OK, we got to do something. We got to make sure nothing going on specifically with all these things that might've caused what we saw in the video. It's a big part of the story the day after the accident, cause there was nothing else going on, but just an interesting sort of tangential storyline that we're going to continue to follow here.

James Pozzi (07:21): Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the other inspections and it'd be interesting to see if other operators are mandated to carry out similar outside of India and obviously the Japanese carriers given the number of 787 aircraft in the global fleet already since entering service. And of course right now this has obviously had a big impact on Air India's operations, but there's other factors going on in the world, too, conflicts for example, which I'm sure is maybe added to the problems Air India is facing at the moment. How are they having an impact on its operations?

Sean Broderick (07:54): Again, an interesting sort of subtext to this story is that these inspections were not just oh, do 'em when you can in the course of normal operations. I mean Air India pulled back, and they did these, and of course most of Air India is using their 787s, as most carriers are, very long-haul flights. They don't have airplanes that they can sub right in, different types of airplanes. So they pulled back international service immediately simply because of these checks. Now they had some other things that they had to do after this accident that weren't maintenance related. They've had a crew rostering issue apparently because of a software change they made and that they've realized that they didn't have their flight and duty time correct. And so they self-disclosed that a few weeks before the accident. That's come back to bite ‘em and they've had some required executive changes there, again the DGCA coming down on them.

(08:50): Then as you pointed out, the global conflicts going on, a lot of overflying of hostile areas, shall we say, that Air India has to do to get to its destinations from India and then back to India. So they just pulled back a lot of that flying, and they cut back a significant amount of their international operations, I dunno what the number is now, but they stopped flying to the U.S. East Coast for a while. They've stopped flying to Europe, stopped flying to the Middle East, and this was all sort of related. The 787 issue was part of it because of the inspections. Four or five of their airplanes I think are in heavy checks. Dan might know the exact number, but it's a handful. So they were already down more than 10% of the fleet just for routine maintenance. So it's caused significant operational disruption and of course they lost a hull with the accident. So that obviously is going to have an impact as well, just in terms of fleet scheduling in addition to all the more significant things that they're having to deal with. So it's been a huge, huge disruption for the airline beyond the normal, we've had a rare fatal accident.

James Pozzi (09:56): Absolutely. Bringing in Dan then of course I know you've got the numbers to hand as well on the program. Maybe let's start with the current status of the Boeing 787 fleet, maybe in terms of aircraft variants, fleet size, and perhaps future growth as well.

Daniel Williams (10:11): Yeah, sure, sure. The 787 fleet, we're approaching the 1,200th delivery of a 787. We're on the cusp, probably before the end of this month or early July. We will take that box where we get past 1,200. Now to put that in context, if you look at the 767 program, which is a good solid Boeing program, and if you remove the KC-46, they're at just over 1,200. So in the course of the next month or two, or maybe next quarter I should say, the 787 program is going to surpass the 767, when the 767 was first delivered in 1982. It's almost as old as I am, just to give my age away. So it's amazing how successful and how much of an important aircraft it has become. And ultimately the 787 was quasi de facto, the 767 replacement. So we start at a delivered fleet of around about 1,200 as it stands right now.

(11:12): The Aviation Week Forecast predicts that that fleet will roughly grow between now and the end of 2034. So we will be a little under two-and-a-half thousand 787s in service by the time we get to the end of 2034. I remember a few months ago we did a podcast specifically on the 787 because Sean talked about it. We were at the point where we are approaching those heavy maintenance milestones, the 12-year-old first D check, these aircraft coming in. To put it in context, the Air India aircraft VT-ANB was its registration number. We believe it had its third C check back in July 2023 when we were looking at our flight tracking data. So therefore it would probably have had its first D check next year. Now this aircraft rolled out of the factory back in 2010, but didn't actually get delivered until January 2014.

(12:07): That particular aircraft was the 26th 787 off the line, and it was about the 116th 787 delivered thereabouts. So I'm trying to do some of these numbers from memory, so please forgive me for one or two either side. So it wasn't a particularly old aircraft because the maintenance aging starts basically upon delivery, not from necessarily when it rolls off the production line. So we were getting to the point where these heavy checks are coming up. The current split, in terms of engine. So let's look at it that way. As we stand today, it's about a two-thirds, one-third split in favor of the GEnX engine versus the Rolls-Royce Trent. We predict our forecast when we look forward when we get to that in-service fleet of a little under two-and-a-half thousand, that split will be more 80-20 in favor of GEnX, just purely because of some of the headaches that some of the operators have had with the Trent, even though this year they've seen the upgrades to those Trent engines come into play.

(13:08): So that's going to help the Trent engine. But likewise, we've also seen last year's Farnborough where I predicted BA will order more 787s. They did, and I also predicted they'd have Rolls-Royce engines because that's what they had, but they didn't get Rolls-Royce engines. So it just goes to show what I know. So in terms of the types of 787s in service, it is dominated by the 787-9. They account for about 70% of the in-service fleet. And likewise, when we look forward to the future in terms of deliveries, it's the 787-9 that is still the predominant aircraft that is going to be delivered, the 787-8, that's the legacy aircraft, which what this Air India aircraft was, and they're the ones that are going to phase out over the coming decade or dozen years or so.

(13:57): So that's kind of where we're at with the 787 fleet as it stands today. There was the milestone, was it last month where we had passed, is it a billion flight hours, something like that, as a collective fleet. I remember seeing something on X, formerly known as Twitter as we have to officially call it, by Boeing to say. And that's a great achievement. And this is the first official hull loss of the 787 fleet. There is one other aircraft, and Sean's going to put his finger up, and there's another aircraft that had a heavy landing, I think it was, or a tail scrape in China. And now they tried, I assume, to repair that. And also if we go back to the early days, there was the Ethiopian 787 that had the fire at London Heathrow, and the aircraft there was there for a long, long time, and Boeing was adamant that they were not going to have a hull loss within the first few years of operation. So they spent a lot of money, a lot of time and fixed and repaired that aircraft and got it into service again. So this is the first official hull loss, as it stands right now. There have been some aircraft retirements, but obviously they're not hull losses, and there are still a couple of other aircraft that probably are going to be retired as well. Certainly some of those, I think they're described as “terrible teens.” Some of the early 787-8s that were slightly like myself, a little bit overweight.

Sean Broderick (15:18): Have one or two scrapped, too. No, I was going to say we actually have had, I think we've had two that have been scrapped. Is that right, or is it one that is scrapped? I dunno, I got the list from your cohorts there, Williams.

Daniel Williams (15:31): Yeah, there's a couple of really early ones they've been scrapped. There's also one currently sat in Kemble, I think it's with AJW. The longer you leave something in Kemble, the climate is not conducive being in the UK weather for long-term storage. But then again, the 787 is a composite aircraft, so it's not a traditional aircraft in that sense. So can Kemble cope with a composite aircraft stored longer than the traditional style aircraft?

Sean Broderick: Right.

James Pozzi (16:02): Just a word, Dan, on the engine market, of course that's obviously competed by Rolls-Royce's Trent 1000. And of course as we've mentioned, GE Aerospace's GEnX. How's that looking, maybe future projections from Aviation Week data?

Daniel Williams (16:18): Yeah, it's looking good if you are GE, and looking not quite as rosy if you are looking at it from a Rolls-Royce point of view, it's not bad. We are forecasting deliveries going forward of over a thousand GEnX-powered aircraft, 787s. And to put that into context, when it comes to the Trent, we are only forecasting about less than 150 over the coming decade, just purely because we've seen the natural market shift. Now don't get me wrong, that's still not an insignificant market. And again, these are just our forecast predictions. Our forecast last came out last October just before our MRO Europe conference. And we will be doing again the same for our upcoming MRO Europe conference. So we spend time and we study these, but when you look at some of the decisions that have come out between this last forecast and what will be our next forecast, it still tends to favor the GEnX engine on the engine as opposed to the Trent. And when we see longtime Rolls customers pivot, the BA  example to GEnX, it doesn't sound great because that comes with a huge MRO cost uptick for BA because they've got Trents in fleet. Why wouldn't they get Trents? And I'm sure there were some give and take with the deals that we're doing, but BA have decided that that's the road that they want to go down, and it's their prerogative. So, you know.

James Pozzi (17:45): I'm sure. Thank you, Dan. And Sean, final word, I guess yourself, of course, safety editor while we've got you here, another story worth touching on is reported extensively in the last nearly 18 months on the Alaska 1282 accident, obviously in January 2024. The final report was adopted on June 24, which was this week, at the time of recording of this podcast. What have been some of the ramifications for MRO over the past 18 months and maybe some of those future ramifications as well?

Sean Broderick (18:16): Yeah, sure. So another interesting one where MRO, there was an immediate impact on the MRO world in that accident. You go back, we remember the accident there. It was a plug that covers a mid exit that Alaska didn't need and didn't use because of the capacity of the airplanes. It's basically a panel that slides into place and is supposed to be held there by four bolts. While the airplane's being manufactured, it needed an assembly line repair, a fuselage repair. And so the plug had to be accessed, moved up and swung out of the way to access where the repair was. The repair had nothing to do with the actual plug. The bolts were never replaced, the door was closed, and the design is such that you close that door and it looks closed. You don't need to attach the pins to sort of make it look closed.

(19:03): The pins just keep it closed. Well swung the plug closed, didn't leave the pins in. The airplane gets delivered, flies for 130 cycles. The plug works itself free, and off it flies. Well a day after the accident, well the airplane made an emergency landing. So you had everything but the plug to look at. Investigators quickly figured out, oh boy, it looks like nothing broke. So something either fell off or wasn't there. Well, they went with the fell off theory first, just in case, grounded all the 737-9s that this particular feature is only available on the -9 and the 737-900ERs. So they grounded them for inspections, did all the inspections, found everybody had their hardware in place. They found all sorts of anomalies like the bolts didn't have torque values, so people were reporting loose bolts. But it was an interesting sort of couple of weeks there.

(19:53): But they figured out, as we now know, that those bolts were never put back in when the assembly line repair was done. So as part of all the changes that Boeing is making and the FAA is making on surveillance and training and all of the things that filled the report that the NTSB did for 18 months or the investigation and the reports, they're still actually final. The report's finalized. We haven't seen the actual words yet. We just know what it's going to say and know the recommendations. One of the things that has come out is that Boeing is redesigning that door plug assembly to make it virtually impossible for you to close the thing and not have the bolts in. I mean, there's no such thing as a minor redesign and it has to be certified and all the things that we all know as part of the business, but they're adding some devices, secondary retention devices is what they're called, to prevent the door from going up, even if the bolts aren't in it.

(20:50): But obviously to make it really clear that if these things aren't in place, if these sort of handles aren't in place, if you will, for the lack of a better term, then that means the bolts aren't in and that means you've still got some work to do. So Boeing's working on it with Spirit. Spirit actually makes this as the supplier. They're going to be part of Boeing here pretty soon we think because Boeing has purchased them to bring them back in. So it's all going to be under one roof. It's looking to get it done in 2026. All the new airplanes rolling out that have this option are going to have it. They're going to make an available retrofit as well for both the MAX 9s and the 737-900ERs in the fleet that have them. Not everybody has it. It depends on capacity, and it also depends on the option. You can get a regular exit door and just leave the thing stowed. But it's just again, another interesting sort of MRO-related aspect of an accident that technically had nothing to do with maintenance, at least not continued operational service maintenance because the airplane wasn't delivered when the work was done. So there again, an example of how maintenance if not comes to the rescue, it gets called to the front lines as soon as there's anything that might potentially be a help by our wrench-turning people out there that we love so much.

James Pozzi (22:07): Thank you, Sean. And that brings us to the end of the podcast today. A lot of ground covered there by both Sean and Dan. So, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today.

Sean Broderick: Thank you for having us.

James Pozzi: And don't miss the next episode by subscribing to the MRO podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And one last request. If you are listening in Apple Podcasts or Spotify and want to support this podcast, please leave us a star rating or write your review. Thank you.