Call me baffled but why are aviation authorities around the world giving a relative ho-hum to an alarming incident with another Air India 787 Dreamliner this weekend past? Saturday’s landing at Birmingham Airport follows one and perhaps two other documented events in which the emergency engine (aka ram air turbine or RAT) engaged unexpectedly.

On Saturday, October 4th, Air India flight 117 from Amritsar was on approach to Birmingham. Everything appeared normal. Nevertheless, the RAT extended from the aft end of the airplane about 500 feet above the ground. The only thing that should trigger the lowering of this small propeller is a flight-threatening loss of essential power to the airplane.

“I have never heard of the RAT being deployed automatically without any hydraulic loss, power loss or failures,” Capt. Charanvir Singh Randhawa of the Federation of Indian Pilots told The New York Times. This same pilots association is asking that all the airline’s Dreamliners be grounded until a comprehensive inspection determines what is triggering systemic electrical problems.

Just five months ago, a similar RAT deployment event ended in disaster in Ahmedabad. On June 12, all but one of the 242 people on board an Air India Dreamliner bound for London and 19 people on the ground were killed when the RAT extended during the takeoff on a flight bound for London. The two pilots of that flight appeared to be confounded in the brief moments before that airliner lost altitude and slammed into a building.

Bafflement remains among those who haven’t raced to conclude that a suicidal pilot is to blame. (Such a conclusion is unsupported by the evidence.) Instead, a Hollywood-style spotlight ought to be focused on the RAT.

The official statement from the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation about this second episode is spare. The matter “required a detailed investigation,” an unidentified staffer told the Tribune News Service of India. The newspaper also reported that an official from the Directorate of Air Safety had been assigned to look into the event.

I guess this is progress but definitely not the kind of swift response one would expect given the seriousness of a second mysterious anomaly with the tiny emergency power supply that has engaged twice during critical phases of flight.

Air India HQ in Delhi

That two confirmed events are on Air India airliners could indicate issues with airline maintenance. But manufacturing might also be relevant, considering that the plane flying as Flight 171 came off the assembly line in Charleston, South Carolina just a few months after Flight 117, that’s the plane that encountered difficulty in Birmingham over the weekend.

However, videos of three other flights in which the RAT was extended in flight can be found on the internet. One month after the Air India crash, a LATAM 787-800 en route to Santiago, Chile, returned to Los Angeles after the ram air turbine deployed. The flight was at 23-thousand feet at the time the pilots notified air traffic control. But in an excellent article written at the time for Simply Flying, Paul Hartly quoted a Reddit post from someone claiming to have seen the plane departing LAX.

“I was at the airport when the flight took off, and the aircraft sounded like a prop plane. It circled around, dumped fuel and came back and landed safely. I got pictures and a video of it landing, and that’s when I realized that the RAT was deployed. I feel that’s probably the sound we heard at takeoff. Not sure if it was an engine failure as the plane had both running on landing and both thrust reversers were deployed. Maybe an electrical malfunction.”

By the way, the LATAM Dreamliner came off the South Carolina assembly line within the same three months as the affected Air India 787s, in late 2014. This is the same year the National Transportation Safety Board was criticizing the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of Boeing design and manufacturing practices, which I wrote about at the time.

One can also find videos of two American Airlines flights where the ram air turbine is whirring. Whether these were routine maintenance flights or inadvertent activations, I do not know and American has not replied to my questions.

I reached out to various airlines operating Dreamliners to ask what, if anything they are doing in response to the Air India and LATAM events. Only United, which operates nearly 80 Dreamliners, responded. Sort of. Spokeswoman Stella Balaskas wrote, “We have nothing to share on this.”

This Spring, Boeing 787 executive Scott Stocker was celebrating the near-global ubiquitousness of the Dreamliner. Eleven hundred and 75 were flying around the globe. More than one billion people have been carried on the company’s newest widebody over the past 14 years.

With that global reach comes a responsibility to nail down, and quickly, what is going on. The RAT is probably not, in and of itself the problem, but a symptom of trouble in the airplane’s propulsion system. And that is very serious business. Serious enough that it ought to be making headlines even without the body count that first brought the RAT under scrutiny in June.