Even after a LatAm Airlines’ Boeing 787-800 Dreamliner en route to Santiago in Chile circled over the Pacific for an hour on August 1 before returning to Los Angeles Airport to make an emergency landing due to engine failure, will Boeing and its proxies still blame Indian pilots for the crash of AI 171 in Ahmedabad in June? Flight trackers and video evidence note that when it landed, its Ram Air Turbine (RAT) was clearly deployed—as AI-171’s last visual showed too.

Just the day before, on July 31, a London-bound Air India Dreamliner flight from Delhi aborted take-off on Thursday after ‘technical issues’ were detected. The Boeing 787-900 aircraft returned to the parking bay and Air India said it was conducting “precautionary checks". Such “precaution" is understandable but given the rising public unease over incidents involving Dreamliners, transparency about these incidents, wherever they happen, must become standard practice.

Due to the AI-171 crash and the orchestrated blame game by 787’s components suppliers and manufacturer, most Indians know now that the RAT emerges when power fails, and fuel supply cut-off is one of several possible causes. Electrical failure resulting in loss of power to flight control, navigation and other systems can also cause the RAT to deploy. And if this latest RAT deployment on the LatAm flight is not probed transparently the public will, well, smell a rat.

Intriguingly, in December 2018, a LatAm Boeing 777-300 on its way from Sao Paulo to London Heathrow had to make an emergency landing at Belo Horizonte. At........

© News18