Air India to get first Boeing 787 Dreamliner on Saturday
06 Sep 2012
The first Boeing 787 Dreamliner for Air India would be delivered on Saturday in New Delhi. The aircraft would fly into Delhi from Germany
The delivery has been delayed by over four years. The carrier had ordered 27 Boeing 787 aircraft.
The fate of the Delay Compensation Agreement, which was cleared by the union cabinet in August and is under fine-tuning by the union law ministry, however, is still not clear.
The agreement, supposed to be signed between the airline and Boeing, would finalise the compensation to be given by the US aircraft major for almost four-year delay in deliveries.
The delivery of the first batch was to be effected in September 2008 but design and production issues at Boeing delayed delivery.
Air India, which is expecting to get 14 of the aircraft by March next year, would launch flights on several long-haul international sectors, including new services to Australia, later this year. The next few weeks would see the plane operating on domestic routes, including Delhi-Mumbai, to enable the pilots and crew get accustomed to its landings and take-offs.
Air India was the second world carrier to have ordered the aircraft and of the airlines that had inducted while Japan's All Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines and Ethiopian Airways are already operating this aircraft.
The plane has a carbon composite material body, which makes it light-weight and therefore is said to consume less fuel. According to Boeing, the plane consumes 20 per cent less fuel as against similar-sized B-767s, which made for better fuel efficiency lowering flying costs.
According to Boeing, it has booked orders for as many as 900 Dreamliners from 47 airlines across the world. The long-range, twin-engine aircraft comes in variants, with the longest-range variant having over 15,000 km non-stop flying capacity.
