Air India to Return Long-Grounded B777-300ER to Service

It has been over 5 years since a Boeing 777 aircraft took off after landing at Nagpur for a compulsory overhaul in February 2020. If rip-offs are a common practice at your neighbourhood car workshop, this was precisely what was done with the Boeing at the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul depot at Nagpur. A spare was detached from this aircraft to fit another aircraft and it will be replaced soon. Gradually, it was stripped of extra spares and the aircraft lay grounded at the Air India Engineering Services Ltd MRO depot at Mihan-SEZ.

It all started with a quick-fix idea for another Boeing 777, which landed at the same time for a phase check with a shorter turnaround. MRO engineers detached a spare from the first Boeing, which has the call sign VT-ALL and installed it in the other plane. And then Boeing became a parts store. It takes about 30 days for an MRO to complete the Boeing-mandated C check, but this one has been delayed for 5 years.

It was expected that the fresh spare would be arranged soon, but calculations backfired. The plane cannot fly back until an airworthiness release certificate is issued. The delay, which was expected to last no more than a few days, dragged on for months and then years.

Aeroplane after aeroplane flew away with some spare or other taken off from VT-ALL, a source said. This exposes difficulties in inventory management. It's not normal to pluck out a vital spare from one aircraft and use it in another. Earlier, AIESL was part of Air India, which was taken over by the Tata Group in 2022.

Cannibalizing the aircraft did not matter so far, as both AIESL and Air India were part of the same group. The overhaul expanded speed after the Tata Group took over. The rollout dates were extended at least 3 times. Earlier, it was scheduled to fly in November; it was later extended to December, then to January.

Source: Times of India