New Delhi:
The Dreamliner planes of Air India may fly again by mid-April, with the airline expressing hope that a permanent solution to the battery-fire that led to the grounding of all the 50 Boeing 787s flying worldwide will be achieved by the month-end, official sources said on Monday.
Air India's hopes were strengthened after a meeting of officials aviation regulators of seven countries, including the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the United States Federal Aviation Administration, US Department of Transportation and Boeing in the US last week.
The meeting was informed that a "permanent fix" to the problem with the lithium-ion batteries was likely to be in place by March-end, the sources said.
The six Boeing 787s of Air India were grounded on January 17 by the DGCA after a global directive by US regulator, Federal Aviation Administration, to stop operations of all the 50 such planes delivered so far to various airlines.
Officials of the aviation regulators of India, Chile, Ethiopia, Japan, Poland, Qatar and the US, whose airlines have these next-generation airplanes in their fleet, attended the meeting with Boeing.
Once a solution is found and certified by the US FAA, it would take about a week to get the grounded Dreamliners ready to fly again, the sources said.
Raymond Conner, Executive Vice president of Boeing and head of its commercial aeroplanes division, was reported as saying that Boeing would not abandon the lithium-ion batteries used in these planes which are at the centre of a worldwide safety probe.
"It is not an interim solution. This is a permanent solution," Mr Conner told reporters in Tokyo last week after a meeting with Japanese Transport Minister Akihiro Ota to discuss problems that caused one battery to catch fire and another to emit smoke.
Without giving any details of the curative package to prevent the battery-fire incidents, Conners had said, "The solution set that we have put in place provides three layers of protection and we feel that this solution takes into account any possible event that could occur, any causal factor that could cause an event."
US regulator FAA, which has been closely reviewing a Boeing proposal on the solution, has made it clear that it would not allow the B-787 to return to commercial service till it was confident that the proposed remedy has addressed the battery failure risks.
Over the past few weeks, FAA officials have been reviewing the Boeing proposal to revamp the Dreamliner's batteries to prevent them from catching fire or to protect the plane in case of fire.
Investigators have earlier said the fire or smoke incidents began with short-circuiting in a single cell of the battery, leading to a chemical reaction that causes progressively hotter temperatures, spreading short-circuiting and fire to other cells.
Boeing's plan includes redesigning the batteries to prevent individual cells from catching fire. If that fails, the plan includes steps to prevent a fire from spreading to other cells or outside the box that contains all eight of the lithium ion battery cells.