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Tag: Airbus

  • Air India signs pacts with Airbus, Boeing to buy 470 planes

    Air India signs pacts with Airbus, Boeing to buy 470 planes

    New Delhi: Air India on Tuesday signed agreements with Airbus and Boeing for acquiring 470 planes for an estimated USD 70 billion at list prices.

    The Tata Group-owned airline had announced that it will buy 470 aircraft, including wide-body planes, in February this year.

    The “firm orders include 34 A350-1000, 6 A350-900, 20 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 10 Boeing 777X widebody aircraft, as well as 140 Airbus A320neo, 70 Airbus A321neo and 190 Boeing 737MAX narrow-body aircraft,” the airline said in a release.

    The purchase agreements were signed on the sidelines of the ongoing Paris Air Show.

    Air India said the agreements go “one step further in its USD 70 billion (based on list prices) fleet expansion program that it announced in February this year”.

    The Airbus A350 will lead the deliveries of the new aircraft later this year, with the bulk of the order to arrive from mid-2025 onwards, it said.

    N Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons and Air India, said the landmark step further positions Air India for long-term growth and success that, “we have every hope, will come together to represent the best of modern aviation to the world”.

    Air India has already started taking delivery of 11 leased B777 and 25 A320 aircraft to accelerate its fleet and network expansion.

    Campbell Wilson, Air India CEO and MD, said its ambitious fleet renewal and expansion programme will see the airline operate the most advanced and fuel-efficient aircraft across its route network within five years.

    Satair, an Airbus company, and Boeing Global Services will support Air India with a broad range of solutions, including parts and maintenance provisioning, digital applications, and modification services.

  • Airbus, Air France acquitted of manslaughter charges in trial over 2009 Rio-Paris crash

    Airbus, Air France acquitted of manslaughter charges in trial over 2009 Rio-Paris crash

    A French court on Monday acquitted Air France and plane manufacturer Airbus in a trial over the 2009 crash of a Rio-Paris flight that killed 228 people.

    The court said that even if “errors” had been committed, “no certain link of causality” between those shortcomings and the accident “could be proven”.

    The two France-based companies went on trial in October to determine their responsibility for the worst aviation disaster in Air France’s history, which killed 216 passengers and 12 crew members.

    The two aviation giants had been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the trial that ran to December but denied the charges.

    As the verdict was read out, relatives of the victims present in court stood up, appearing stunned, then sat down again.

    The hearings in Paris centred on the role of defective so-called Pitot tubes, which are used to measure the flight speed of aircraft.

    The court heard how a malfunction with the tubes, which became blocked with ice crystals during a mid-Atlantic storm, caused alarms to sound in the cockpit of the Airbus A330 and the autopilot system to switch off.

    Technical experts highlighted how, after the instrument failure, the pilots put the plane into a climb that caused the aircraft to lose upward lift from the air moving under its wings, thus losing altitude.

    Air France and Airbus have blamed pilot error as the main cause for the crash.

    But lawyers for the families have argued that both companies were aware of the Pitot tube problem before the crash, and that the pilots were not trained to deal with such a high-altitude emergency.

    The court said Airbus committed “four acts of imprudence or negligence”, including not replacing certain models of the Pitot tubes that seemed to freeze more often on its A330-A340 fleet, and “withholding information” from flight operators.

    It said Air France had committed two “acts of imprudence” in the way it disseminated an information note on the faulty tubes to its pilots.

    But there was not a strong enough causal link between these failings and the accident to show an offence had been committed.

    (AFP)