New Delhi: The Federation of Indian Pilots, the country’s largest pilots’ association, has asked for all Boeing 787s to be grounded, report Mark Walker and Hari Kumar in the New York Times. This comes after an Air India dreamliner unexpectedly deployed its Ram Air Turbine (RAT)—a last-resort emergency power system that gets auto-deployed when a plane faces power loss, and helps it land safely.
“I have never heard of the R.A.T. being deployed automatically without any hydraulic loss, power loss or failures,” Capt. Charanvir Singh Randhawa, president of the association, which represents more than 6,000 pilots across India, told the daily.
Ram Air Turbine drops from the fuselage when a plane loses power or hydraulic pressure, and helps power critical systems like flight controls and navigation instruments. The device got unexpectedly deployed during Air India Flight 117, which landed safely in Birmingham, England, on Saturday, says the report.
It was the second instance since June of a ram air turbine being deployed on an Air India Boeing 787. On June 12, the ill-fated Air India Flight 171 also used the turbine, but the plane crashed 30 seconds after takeoff from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International, killing 241 of the 242 people on board.
“Capt. Randhawa said the association had sent a letter on Sunday to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the national regulator, saying that an electrical fault could have caused the ram air turbine to deploy unexpectedly,” says the report.
In the Financial Times’ India Business Briefing, Veena Venugopal assesses India’s “softening” stance on crypto. In large part, she writes, this newfound acceptance is due to US President Donald Trump’s “embrace of crypto”, leaving “countries like India” with “no recourse but to follow suit”.
“There are no signs of this preparation, though. Acceptance of virtual digital assets did not feature in the 22 reforms that the Reserve Bank of India announced last week. The Indian government has not laid out any regulation to regularise cryptocurrency, but it does tax transactions involving them,” she writes.
“Publishing a regulation framework would legitimise crypto and the worry is that a legitimate framework would raise systemic risks that cannot be easily controlled because it would involve integrating a complex and volatile asset class into the financial system. This leaves cryptocurrency in a weird no man’s land in India, where it is neither fully accepted nor banned outright.”
Optimists are viewing Donald Trump’s H-1B application fee as an opportunity—to get India’s best and brightest back home. However, as a report by Nikhil Inamdar in the BBC suggests, this might be easier said than done.
“There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that an increasingly hostile immigration environment in the US is prompting a few Indians to think along these lines. But getting hundreds of thousands of people to ditch Bellevue for Bengaluru will be easier said than done, several experts told the BBC,” says the report.
While there’s a 30 percent increase in the number of Indians wanting to return home post Ivy League education, desire alone is not enough. There needs to be a concerted effort by the government to lure this section back home.
“The government will have to go out and actually identify individuals—including top-of-the-line scientists, professionals and entrepreneurs—it wants back. That requires effort, and it needs to come straight from the top,” Sanjaya Baru, a former media advisor to the late former prime minister Manmohan Singh, has been quoted as saying.
“There are both pull and push factors that have led to highly qualified professionals consistently leaving the country, Mr Baru said, and India has celebrated this trend, rather than arresting it,” the report notes.
“The pull factors include a growing number of countries offering golden visas and citizenship or residency by immigration programmes.” For example, Germany has grown into a particularly attractive option—and has immediately laid out the red carpet for Indian skilled migrants.”
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)