THE TROUBLED BOEING 787 Dreamliner suffered another setback today as an All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight was forced to return to Tokyo just an hour into a two-hour flight.
The plane had been flying to the southern Japanese city of Kumamoto this morning.
But the plane returned to Haneda by 10:20 am due to “trouble with the weather radar”, ANA spokesman Ryosei Nomura told AFP.
All passengers got on another 787 at Haneda and safely arrived in Kumamoto in the early afternoon, he said.
Nomura said this kind of trouble “could happen in other models of airplane”.
“It wasn’t an irregularity peculiar to the 787,” he said.
The weather radar on board the plane malfunctioned, ANA said.
While this is a common problem on many models of plane, the Dreamliner has been hit with a number of operational issues.
These include the complete grounding of the entire 787 global fleet in January. Lithium-ion batteries overheated and caught fire on parked planes.
Just 73 of the 515 ordered planes have been delivered after a swathe of delays had hit production.
Boeing revealed over the weekend that they had finished the construction of the first instalment of the next generation of the Dreamliner, the 787-9.
The newer version, of which there are 366 ordered, can fly 300 miles longer while burning 20 per cent less fuel than its predecessor.
Even with the new version, industry commentators suggest that the Dreamliner project will not turn a profit until 2020 at the earliest.
AFP contributed additional reporting
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