Air India Boeing Dreamliner turns back after ‘technical issue'

An Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner plane was forced to turn around on Monday after a suspected mid-air technical issue.
The aircraft, which was bound for New Delhi, returned to Hong Kong after the pilot believed there to be an issue, a source told Reuters.
The incident came days after an Air India flight to London using the same type of Boeing crashed in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad moments after take-off.
The crash killed 241 of the 242 people on board and dozens more on the ground. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British citizen whose brother was also on the flight, was the only person to escape the wreckage alive.
Air India flight AI315 travelling out of Hong Kong International Airport on Monday underwent checks following the reported issue, the source told Reuters.
The flight requested local standby at around 1pm and 'landed safely at around 1.15pm', a spokesman for Airport Authority Hong Kong said, adding that airport operations were not affected.
It had taken off from Hong Kong at around 12.20pm, reaching an altitude of 22,000ft before it started descending, according to flight tracking website AirNav Radar. The plane was seven years old.
Boeing and Air India did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the flight, Reuters said.
The crash of the Lound-bound Air India flight last week saw Boeing shares drop 4.8 per cent, wiping billions of dollars from its value.
Indian health officials began handing the bodies of those killed in the incident to their loved ones on Monday, but most families continued to wait for the results of DNA testing.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner was engulfed by flames when it went down moments after take-off, smashing into nearby buildings used by medical staff.
Indian authorities are yet to identify the cause of the disaster and have ordered inspections of Air India's Dreamliners.
On Sunday, authorities announced that the plane's second black box – the cockpit voice recorder – had been recovered.
Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, India's aviation minister, said on Saturday he hoped decoding the first black box – the flight data recorder – would 'give an in-depth insight' into the circumstances of the crash.

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