Air India, India’s flagship carrier, said it would temporarily reduce the number of international flights it operates, after the deadly crash of one of its flights last week unleashed plane delays, unnerved passengers and prompted technical inspections of its fleet.
The airline, which is grappling with the aftermath of the June 12 crash that killed at least 270 people, said late Wednesday in a post on X that it was cutting international services on certain planes by 15 percent at least until mid-July. The move, which applies to wide-body jets — planes with two aisles that are typically used for long-haul flights — is meant to “ensure stability of operations, better efficiency and minimize inconvenience to passengers,” it said.
Air India’s decision came a day after Indian authorities directed the airline to improve its operations. The airline has been inundated by complaints from passengers about canceled flights, faulty cabin devices and inadequate information being given to travelers. Company officials said the closure of airspace over Iran because of its conflict with Israel, which made flying routes longer, only added to the disruption.
On Tuesday, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the country’s main civil flight regulator, said in a statement that it found no “major safety concerns” as it conducted technical inspections of Air India’s fleet of 33 Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner planes. That was the model of plane that crashed less than a minute after it took off from the Indian city of Ahmedabad, bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, last week.
So far, 26 of the airline’s planes have been cleared, Air India said.
However, the regulator did find “maintenance-related issues” and directed the carrier to “strengthen internal coordination across engineering, operations, ground handling units.” It also recommended that the airline improve its communications with passengers and build a better system to share real-time information about plane defects internally.
With a fleet of 128 planes, Air India operates around 1,000 flights daily, including to dozens of overseas destinations. One of its most popular routes is a nonstop flight from Delhi to New York.
The carrier has canceled more than 80 flights since the crash a week ago. Dozens of customers took to social media to complain about abrupt cancellations and a lack of communication from the airline. In some instances, passengers had to get off planes after boarding or wait hours for pilots to arrive. Many who had traveled from smaller cities were stranded at airports, not knowing if or when they would reach their destinations.
Investigators are trying to determine what caused Flight 171 to crash into buildings close to the airport, killing all but one of 242 passengers and dozens of others on the ground.
The plane struggled to gain lift immediately after taking off, and investigators from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing are in the process of downloading information contained in the plane’s black boxes. These devices could contain valuable information about any issues that affected the flight and the final communications between pilots.
In Ahmedabad, the painstaking work of matching the DNA of crash victims with relatives who provided samples continued. As of Wednesday, the DNA of 208 victims had been identified, and 173 bodies had been handed over to their families, according to Dr. Rakesh Joshi, the superintendent of the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, where most of the work is being done.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
Anupreeta Das covers India and South Asia for The Times. She is based in New Delhi.
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