Air India warned by DGCA for flying Airbus planes with unchecked escape slides

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has warned Air India for breaching safety rules after three of its Airbus planes flew despite being overdue for checks on emergency equipment, and for being slow to address the issue, according to government documents.

The warning notices and an investigation report — both reviewed by sources — were not in any way related to last week's crash of an Air India Boeing 787-8 plane that killed all but one of the 242 people onboard, and were sent days before that incident.

In the report, the said spot checks in May on three Air India Airbus planes found that they were operated despite mandatory inspections being overdue on the "critical emergency equipment" of escape slides.

In one case, the watchdog found that the inspection of an Airbus A320 jet was delayed by more than a month before being carried out on May 15.

AirNav Radar data shows that during the delay the plane flew to international destinations such as Dubai, Riyadh and Jeddah.

Another case, involving an Airbus A319 used on domestic routes, showed checks were over three months late, while a third showed an inspection was two days late.

Air India, which was taken over by the Tata Group in 2022 from the government, said in statement that it was "accelerating" verification of all maintenance records, including dates of the escape slides, and would complete the process in the coming days.

In one of the cases, Air India said, the issue came to light when an engineer from AI Engineering Services "inadvertently deployed an escape slide during maintenance".