With Boeing's 787 Grounded, Pilots Find Other Stuff to Do

With the worldwide fleet of Boeing 787s grounded, Air India pilot Anjum Chabra has turned to hip-hop to lament his fate. “Ain’t no flight for me here so ain’t no Singapore/ Ain’t no casino for me, so there’s no money no more,” raps the pilot in a humorous video posted on YouTube. “What kind of pilot am I/ Who sits at home most of the time, never gets to fly?”

Such is the plight of an estimated 600 Dreamliner pilots worldwide since the planes were grounded on Jan. 16, according to Ryota Himeno, an analyst at Barclays Securities Japan. Pilots, who can spend months training for new aircraft, usually don’t fly more than one type of plane to reduce the risk of making a mistake in a different cockpit. “When you don’t know when the aircraft will be ready to fly again, you don’t want to cross that bridge of putting them onto another aircraft,” explains Peter Harbison, executive chairman at consultant CAPA Centre for Aviation in Sydney.