Japanese-based airline company All Nippon Airways, on January 21, 2013, said that the grounding of Boeing’s Dreamliner across the globe has forced the airline to cancel around 335 flights up to next Sunday. The cancellation of flights affected around 48,000 passengers.
The airline said that the cancellations applied on its domestic routes from January 16, 2013. The flight cancellations were done after a Dreamliner made an emergency landing which sparked a global alert. About 292 flights in total have been cancelled for 44,074 passengers.
Apart from domestic flights, around 43 international flights have been cancelled as well. The affected flights include those from Tokyo to San Jose, Beijing and Seattle. Earlier this month, the flagship Dreamliners designed by Boeing suffered a series of glitches which raised questions over the safety of the aircraft. It also prompted a global alert from the US Federal Aviation Administration, which grounded 50 operational 787 aircraft.
In one of the incidents, the pilots of a domestic flight had to perform an emergency landing due to the risk of a fire after smoke emerged from the airplane, apparently due to battery issues. However, the US agency clarified that the smoke emerged after the flight landed and was not caused due to the overcharging of the battery
