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Passengers Returning As Air India Regains Footing, CEO Reports

Air India new livery 737-8 2023

Air India Boeing 737-8

Credit: Air India

LONDON—Air India is starting to see the early fruits of its renewal under private owners, despite the ongoing frustrations of late deliveries of aircraft and cabin equipment, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said Dec. 3.

Passengers’ NPS (net promoter score) results—a measure of customer satisfaction—are up 100 points with travelers on the carrier’s new Airbus A350s compared to its legacy widebodies, Wilson said, while across the entire fleet the NPS score has gone up 40 points over the past year.

More than 100 new aircraft have joined the fleet over the past two years, with a new aircraft arriving roughly every six days.

Speaking at the UK’s Aviation Club in London, Wilson said that inconsistency in the product as increasing numbers of new aircraft were fed into the fleet could be a frustration for passengers. Wilson said the situation will steadily improve over the next two years as more new aircraft arrive, and older ones are refurbished to the new standard.

In 2023, Air India firmed up orders for 470 aircraft—70 widebodies comprising 34 Airbus A350-1000s and six A350-900s, together with 20 Boeing 787s and 10 777Xs. In the narrowbody category, the airline signed for 140 A320neos, 70 A321neos and 190 737 MAX family aircraft.

Aircraft delays are already causing frustration, Wilson said. Air India signed up for 50 737-8s that had already been manufactured; those were all supposed to be delivered by the end of 2024, but only 34 have been delivered to date, so the initial timeline will slip by around six months.

Similarly, line-fit aircraft have been delayed both by the slowing of production rates at Boeing and by the recent strike. “We don’t have a handle on exactly how long that [delay] will be, but it will be a matter of quite a few months,” Wilson said.

Likewise, the well-known bottlenecks at seat manufacturers—particularly with business-class seats—are having an adverse effect on the refitting of the cabins of older aircraft. “What can you do?” he said.

On the positive side of the wholesale overhaul of the airline, which had languished under government control for decades before being privatized by the giant Tata group, the plan to bring MRO work in-house has gone well, with all line maintenance—apart from that for the airline’s 777s—scheduled to be handled internally by the end of December. The 777s’ maintenance is set to be completed by February or March 2025. Additionally, a major center for base maintenance, with an eventual 12 aircraft bays, is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2026.

While rival Indian carrier IndiGo is taking a large number of long-range A321XLRs into its fleet that could potentially eat into Air India’s long-haul traffic, Wilson said that the increasing scale of the Indian market should allow all parties the opportunity to grow.

For the past 30 years, much long-haul Indian traffic has been siphoned off by the Gulf airlines, which have funneled it through connecting flights at their hubs. As Indians start to have restored confidence in their national carrier, they are returning to Air India, Wilson said. “I think people will come back to flying nonstop because clearly it’s a much better proposition to fly nonstop from India to wherever you wish to go, rather than have to stop off at three o’clock in the morning and schlep through an airport for a couple of hours,” Wilson said.

This returning confidence could be seen in the airline’s finances, he said. Chronically loss-making for decades, Air India is now EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) positive.


 

Alan Dron

Based in London, Alan is Europe & Middle East correspondent at Air Transport World.