New Delhi, June 20: After a report claimed that two senior Air India flight attendants were sacked as they refused to change their statement on a technical glitch in the door of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner last year, the airline on Friday said the said cabin crew members were terminated for their “misconduct and behaviour and continuing to falsify critical information during the course of an investigation”.
“The said investigation was launched after an emergency slide was activated while opening the aircraft door post landing,” said Air India in a statement to IANS.
According to the media report, the two former Air India flight attendants alleged that that the door of the Boeing Dreamliner had malfunctioned as the slide raft deployed, despite the door being opened in the “manual mode”. Slide rafts deploy when a door is opened in “armed” or “automatic mode”, according to the report. The incident is reported to have occurred on May 14 last year, after the Mumbai-London flight AI-129 docked at Heathrow airport and the passengers disembarked.
Air India, in its statement, said two former employees were given multiple fair opportunities to reconsider their statements, which may have been given inadvertently, as revealed in the investigations undertaken.
“It was clear in the investigation that the slide could not have been activated unless the door was in disarmed/manual mode. This was corroborated by relevant data, images and video evidence and as well as third party experts,” according to the airline statement.
It further stated that “it is regrettable that the former cabin crew members are using the tragedy of AI171 to further repeat their falsehood which has been clearly established in our investigation”.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Civil Aviation has clarified that no decision has been taken as yet on sending abroad the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or the digital flight data recorder (DFDR) of the crashed AI171 flight for retrieval and analysis.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation urged all stakeholders “to refrain from speculation on such sensitive matters and to allow the investigative process to proceed with the seriousness and professionalism it warrants”.
IANS