Rat inside Air India’s Dreamliner forces it to abort flight to Milan and return to Delhi

A rat in the cabin of an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner forced the aircraft to return back to base after four hours into the flight AI-123 from New Delhi to Milan. The rat was spotted by some passengers and crew members. Since such sighting means the aircraft must land immediately, the captain had no other alternative.
This has been reported in timesofindia.indiatimes.com dated 31 July 2015.

At the time, the aircraft was over Pakistan airspace and needed to jettison furl to ensure a safe landing. It had been filled up for the long flight to Italy hence, a large quantity of fuel had to be jettisoned.
Rat menace in aircraft is not new – it happens all over the world. But, this happens to be the second time in as many months that AI flights from Delhi faced a rodent problem. In May-end, its aircraft had to be grounded in Leh after some rats were spotted on it.
In the opinion of experts, rats usually get on board an aircraft via the catering vans. The rodents follow the large storage cases in which food trays are kept. Food keeps getting dropped and the rats get on the high lifts that take those storage cases to aircraft and, subsequently, remain there.
The trouble is that if they chew through the electrical cables of the aircraft, it can go out of control and crash. (Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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