Air India flight AI 333 is a scheduled service between Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) and Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL).
With a scheduled departure time of 12:35 and an arrival of 15:20, the flight lasts for 3 hours and 45 minutes. The carrier deploys one of its many Boeing 787 Dreamliners for this relatively short international flight.
On August 16th, flight AI 333 was already running late, departing Bangkok almost an hour behind schedule at 13:28. Shortly after its takeoff, as the plane reached around 6,000 feet, the pilots received a slats failure warning according to the reports published in aviationindia.net.
The cockpit crew wasted no time in returning to Bangkok, where the plane was inspected by a maintenance crew and later cleared to depart again. The Indian Express quotes a person familiar with the matter as saying, “The pilots saw a slats failure warning and decided to turn the aircraft back to Bangkok. The aircraft was checked by the maintenance crew in Bangkok and was cleared to fly to Delhi. It departed at 5.03pm local time, and reached Delhi at 7.25 pm IST.”
India’s aviation regulator, the DGCA, is looking into the incident.
The aircraft in question is an 8-year-old Boeing 787 delivered to Air India in 2014 and has clocked in 24,000 hours and 4,731 flight cycles. In the days preceding the incident, it had also flown between London (LHR) and Hyderabad (HYD), Delhi (DEL) and Hong Kong (HKG), and Dubai (DXB) and Delhi (DEL).
