Air India CEO Campbell Wilson has blamed an aircraft seat shortage as his biggest supply chain issue, causing delays in refurbishing around 100 aircraft.
The airline is addressing challenges with seat manufacturers, aircraft delivery delays, and supply limitations, and is mitigating these by leasing and opportunistic purchases.
Air India is partway through merging with Vistara and Air India Express with AIX Connect, with significant progress made in the last two years in fleet and service improvements.
Air India has ordered nearly 500 aircraft to enhance its long-haul capacity, aiming to improve connectivity to North America, Europe, Australasia, and Asia.
Campbell Wilson shared: “One of the consequences of a lack of capital in the past was a lack of capacity, particularly in long-haul aircraft. India as a country had 43 widebody aircraft in service when Air India was privatised two years ago. We’ve since made a significant order of nearly 500 aircraft a couple of years ago to bring that needed capacity to the market.” “That means we are going to be deploying these widebody aircraft to many parts of the world. Air India’s connectivity to North America, Europe, Australasia, and Asia was far short of what the market can sustain, and we’re trying to rectify that. But that’s a function of aircraft deliveries.”
We’re in the process of ensuring things stabilise, but the hard work really has been done. Air India has come, in the last two years, from a state of really quite poor repair. We’ve made a lot of progress.” The big work yet to be done is rehabilitating the older aircraft we inherited from the former owner. “We’re about a third of the way through re-fitting the narrowbody aircraft and we will complete that by mid-2025. In early 2025, we’ll commence re-fitting 40 widebody aircraft, and that will take about two years to complete.”
“The slowdown in production of Boeing aircraft has a flow-on effect. We’re having to recalibrate our expectations and plans.”
