Ethiopian Airlines B787 Dreamliner suffers mid-air depressurisation; 7 fall ill on Mumbai-bound flight, 1 hospitalised after emergency landing at CSMIA

MUMBAI: A Mumbai-bound Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa made an emergency landing in the city at 1.42am on Friday after the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft experienced a depressurisation problem.

"On landing, seven passengers were attended to by the airport medical team for decompression-related symptoms, out of which one required hospitalisation," a source said.The incident comes days after 11 flyers, including 6 crew members, felt dizzy and nauseous during an Air India Heathrow-Mumbai flight operated with a Boeing 777 aircraft on June 23. The cause for the illness is under probe.

Sources said Friday's incident occurred on flight ET640, when the aircraft (ET-AXS) was overflying the Arabian Sea.

It was cruising at 33,000 feet when the cabin depressurisation took place and the pilots executed a rapid descent to a lower altitude, according to data from Flightradar24.For human survival, aircraft cabins are sealed and pressurised with conditioned air and oxygen. This allows aircraft to fly at higher altitudes where oxygen levels are low. However, on rare occasions, the pressurisation system can fail. The pressure and oxygen level in the cabin will then drop, and oxygen masks deploy from the overhead panel.