India Weekly: Air India’s Paris show plans & Akasa’s Boeing jibe

A few weeks ago, while Air India CEO Campbell Wilson was in London, he took a swipe at Boeing in an interview, stating that the airline hesitated to firm up its Boeing options, unlike its commitment to Airbus. “We don’t want to commit to anything until we have confidence in when it’s going to come. And likewise, they (Boeing) don’t want to offer something until they have confidence in when it’s going to come,” he said. Just last week in Gurugram, Wilson warned that supply chain issues would continue to impact airlines for another year or two and the next four to five years. Against this backdrop, the news that Air India is in discussions to place yet another substantial wide-body aircraft order from both Boeing and Airbus surprised some. Sources told Reuters that the airline is considering 30 to 40 aircraft, including a mix of Airbus A350s and Boeing 777Xs, with the total order potentially exceeding 50 aircraft. The specifics are expected to become clearer around the Paris Air Show in June. This move follows Air India's massive 2023 order of 470 aircraft and an additional 100 Airbus narrow-body aircraft last year, bringing the total to 570. The airline already has deals for 50 Airbus A350s, 10 Boeing 777Xs, and 20 787 Dreamliners from previous agreements. A significant wide-body expansion would further modernize Air India’s fleet, positioning it to compete more effectively on international routes against global carriers like Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Singapore Airlines. Importantly, Air India has possibly realized that while frustration with Boeing is one thing, securing production slots years in advance is crucial to avoid losing them to competitors. Its archrival, IndiGo, is already shifting its 18-year-old low-cost airline business model by introducing business class seats on domestic flights and wet-leasing Boeing 787s while awaiting its first Airbus A350s in 2027. If IndiGo’s Boeing 787 experiment proves successful, the airline could lease more wide-body planes, making life more challenging for Air India. Over the past three years, it has already spent $3 billion in its turnaround efforts. Additionally, with dozens of A321XLRs set to arrive by the end of this year, IndiGo is poised to expand its international network even further and take competition to more of Air India’s routes. Both use Delhi Airport as their main base, which makes things even more complex for route economics. To be sure, Campbell Wilson’s remarks about Boeing were mild compared to what happened at an Akasa Air town hall for pilots in February, which became public this week. During the session, Akasa’s chief of strategic acquisitions, Priya Mehra, bluntly called Boeing the “elephant in the room,” blaming a workers’ strike for causing the airline “sleepless nights.” She even said Akasa CEO Vinay Dube told Boeing to “stop holding big events and parties” and instead “focus on production.” Co-founder Aditya Ghosh referred to Boeing as “Boeing bloody … retarding our speed,” while Dube himself was quoted by Reuters as telling pilots, “We just don’t have enough aircraft to fly … nobody wants to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs.” Clearly, India’s airlines want planes—now and fast.

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