Opinion | Don’t let the fear of flying stage a return
Unease over flying used to be a thing of the past. However, there are incipient signs of a revival of that feeling, what with reports of aircraft snags surfacing a little too frequently for comfort. Suspicions have arisen that Indian flyers are being ferried on aircraft equipped with engines that may not be in perfect shape, going by the glitches that have lately been reported. Aware of the problem, airlines are working with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the aviation regulator, to find ways to fix it without having to ground a large section of the country’s fleet of commercial aircraft. The DGCA has set a deadline, beyond which IndiGo and GoAir will not be allowed to fly their Airbus A320neo aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney (P&W) engines, unless these are re-equipped with suitably modified components. Budget airline IndiGo is among the biggest clients of Airbus’s A320neo narrow-bodied jets, many of them fitted with these P&W engines that offer the advantage of superior fuel efficiency but have given trouble off and on since they entered service about three years ago.
