MUMBAI: An Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner en route from Bengaluru to London had to be diverted to Jeddah Monday after its crew encountered a series of unexplained warnings across different aircraft systems, sources said.Flight AI-133, operated by the 13-year-old aircraft registered as VT-ANI, had been flying for more than six hours when pilots decided to divert as a precautionary measure. The aircraft landed safely at Jeddah around 8 pm IST, Air India said in a statement. “The aircraft is currently undergoing comprehensive technical inspections in accordance with established safety protocols,” AI added.The same aircraft, VT-ANI, was under regulatory scrutiny three months ago with Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issuing a show-cause notice to Air India for operating it despite repetitive faults.Air India said the Monday flight was diverted over a “suspected technical issue”. According to sources, the defects flagged included auto-throttle disconnect, which forces pilots to manage speed manually; fuel jettison system fault, which meant the fuel cannot be jettisoned to lower the landing weight of the aircraft. Then there was an overweight landing advisory. Other warnings were about abnormal fuel pressure on the right engine and “aft outflow valve problem”, a fault in the rear cabin pressurisation valve that helps control air pressure inside the passenger cabin.“These warnings appeared across seemingly unrelated areas such as engines, fuel, flight controls, and pressurisation. This pattern suggests an issue with the aircraft’s common core system (CCS),” sources added.The CCS is like the B787’s “central nervous system”, the aircraft’s main computer network that shares data between almost every major system on the aircraft, including flight controls, engines, hydraulics, fuel, electrical power, and cabin pressure. A host of warnings from unrelated areas would mean CCS wasn’t presenting a clear picture of the aircraft’s condition.Capt C S Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots, also stated that the aircraft encountered multiple system faults which pointed to a serious issue deep within the Boeing 787’s common core system. The system faults could be related to the fiber optic translator – which converts light signals travelling through the plane’s fibre-optic cables into electrical signals so computers can understand them – or the sensor data concentrator, which collects information from sensors across the aircraft and feeds it into this network, Capt Randhawa said. When these components become unstable, different systems begin receiving inconsistent or conflicting data, triggering a cascade of unrelated warnings.“Diversion was the only correct response to an aircraft that was no longer presenting a single, reliable state,” he said. “This is precisely why the June 12 (2025) B787 Ahmedabad accident cannot be dismissed as an isolated anomaly. When the same critical architecture layer surfaces again, the question is no longer what failed, but whether the system design itself permits such cascading ambiguity under certain conditions,” Capt Randhawa added.
