Mumbai: Air India has grounded an aircraft maintenance engineer and has also set up a committee to decide on possible action against some pilots who were involved in operating an Airbus A320 neo plane multiple times without airworthiness certification in November, according to sources.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is probing the incident reported on November 26. The regulator had asked the airline to carry out an internal probe to fix the responsibility and ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future. Following the A320 neo aircraft-related developments, Air India’s Accountable Manager and Director of Flight Operations Manish Uppal has sent out a communication to all pilots, reminding them of their “responsibility” regarding document validation, the sources said.
However, some pilots are not happy with the communication, claiming that it amounts to “passing the buck” for the violations that have happened with respect to the A320 neo plane operations.
The sources said the four-year old aircraft A320 neo aircraft VT-TNQ belonging to erstwhile Vistara was grounded for a long time and its airworthiness certificate had also expired. On November 24, the airline decided to take the aircraft off the ground and conducted a proven flight over Delhi. On the same day, the aircraft operated commercial services on Delhi-Bengaluru-Mumbai sector, they said.
The next day, the same aircraft operated commercial flights on Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Hyderabad-Mumbai then again Mumbai-Hyderabad- Mumbai. After that, the plane was sent for maintenance on the same day and that was when the engineers found that there was no valid airworthiness certification, the sources said.