Love is in the air on Valentine’s Day. Quite literally for Air India, Airbus and Boeing. On Valentine’s Day 2023, the Maharajah announced an order for 470 aircraft. 250 Airbus and 220 Boeing. Where will they use them? I decided to find out…
The aircraft order is mainly single-aisles, with 210 A320neos and 190 737 MAX in the books. The wide-bodies are 40 A350s, 20 787-9s and 10 777-9s. Deliveries have already started, but will take some years to be fully integrated into Air India’s fleet.
This means that Air India will have already begun calibrating their network for the new fleet. So we should be able to find gaps and opportunities which the new aircraft can fill.
Generally speaking, Air India like all airlines has seven ways of using their new aircraft:
1. Launch new routes
2. Introduce new flights on existing routes to boost connectivity
3. Introduce new flights on existing routes to boost capacity
4. Re-time flights on existing routes to boost connectivity
5. Re-time flights on existing routes for a more desirable departure & arrival times
6. Up-gauge flights that need more capacity
7. Up-gauge flights that need a wide-body premium cabin experience but are currently operated by single-aisles.
Air India have both domestic and international networks. Many of the planes, especially the A320neos and 737 MAX will go into the saturated and competitive domestic network. Some will replace existing aircraft like the A319-100. Others will expand the depth and breadth of Air India’s domestic network to take advantage of economic growth and compete with low-cost Indigo.
In this article I will concentrate on international routes, for two reasons:
1. I suspect that most readers will be more interested in international routes
2. I have written before about Air India’s international opportunity (see article) and believe that under TATA’s ownership they will become a tech co with aircraft rather than a traditional airline. I believe their strategy is to monetise affluent passengers travelling INTO India as well as India’s growing middle class class. Accordingly, the new gateway to India will be a TATA/Air India super-app. Evaluating the international network is a good way to test my theory.
I will also not cover options (3) and (6) in the top list above, the two concerned with increasing capacity, because I cannot see Air India’s proprietary demand data.
So let’s have a look at their international network. In the schedule currently filed for 16-Mar to 22-Mar-2025, Air India will operate 842 international flights. Cheap and cheerful subsidiary Air India Express will operate 164 international flights a week.
I have summarised the networks in a selection of maps below, produced with the excellent Great Circle Mapper.
Option 1: launch new routes
Looked at purely in terms of existing flows, launching new routes with the new planes is not necessarily going to be a great idea for Air India. The middle eastern carriers have Europe and the Gulf sewn up. Low-cost Indigo, who also have many aircraft on order, are probably going to make the Gulf markets even more competitive than they are already.
Air India Express is an interesting case because they operate in low-yield, labour contract markets. They are not an aspirational lifestyle brand like easyJet or AirAsia. it is easy to imagine Indigo and the Gulf carriers crowding them out. Yet Air India Express has more than 150 planes on order, so clearly Air India considers they have a future. I will examine the role of Air India Express under TATA’s ownership in a future article.
There is plenty of traffic between India and North America that currently goes the long way round via the Gulf, Europe or even the Pacific. More Air India services to North America would surely fill up at a good yield as there is high demand and, in some segments, high willingness to pay. But they would also be risky for Air India in terms of cost and requirement to overfly Russia.
Over in the Americas there is no shortage of viable cities for new Air India services.
What British Airways does in North America is they launch new routes by outsourcing the decision to the market and get cities to pay them to fly. That way the revenue is guaranteed.
Air India could do the same but in reverse. The idea is that Air India would offer Indian metros a service to any North American city they want, for a price. The highest bidders win the flight. Indian metro government would find this desirable as it would boost business and tourism links. The risk for Air India would be offset by a third-party supporter.
The model is also well aligned with the Air India as the new gateway of India strategy I outlined in my 2021 article TATA’s Challenge, focused on bringing in high spending travellers to India rather than focusing just on outbound travel.
Australia has a similar demand profile and less risk, but the market is smaller. Like Americans, Australian travellers are mass affluent and just the sort of people who will be spending a lot of money on hotels, meals and experiences in India.
Air India already has Sydney and Melbourne, so the large cities of the south east are served. Relatively small markets Brisbane and Adelaide come with long stage lengths and high costs. Perth and Darwin are much closer but with a similar mass affluent traveller base, and so much less risky.
So in conclusion, I would expect the focus of new international routes to be Australia, particularly northern and western cities, and North America. I would not expect new routes in the Gulf or Europe.
Option 2: boosting connectivity
I was surprised by how poor Air India’s international connectivity is at Delhi and Mumbai. The minimum connection time is 90 minutes at both airports. I defined a connection as ‘very good’ if it is less than three hours, ‘good’ if less than six, ‘OK’ if less than nine and ‘poor’ otherwise.
I did not find many routes that were not ‘poor’ in at least one direction.
Consider London to Melbourne for example, the ‘kangaroo route’. The best Air India can do involves an 11 hour connection. Vienna to Hong Kong needs a 15 hour connection. Frankfurt to Singapore is OK, with two to five hour connections.
But in general international to international connectivity on Air India is clearly not their strategic priority. They are not even trying to compete with Emirates, Qatar Airways or Singapore Airlines outside their core India market.
Surely Air India would want to improve this?
Actually, perhaps not. Remember the ‘new gate of India’ strategy. This deliberate lack of good international to international connectivity is good evidence for this. I think the strategy is sensible. They are focusing on what they can do best – India.
I reckon we will not see much deployment of aircraft to boost connectivity because Air India will be connecting international travellers to and from India. They will leave the Europe <> Oz and America <> Asia business to the Gulf carriers.
If Air India did increase frequency to enhance connectivity, my guess would be they would do it first on Australia to get the kangaroo route going. But I will not expect to see it any time soon.
Option 3: creating more desirable departure & arrival times
A number of routes have truly terrible departure times. BOM-BKK leaves at 0415, BOM-RUH at 0300, DEL-YYZ at 0355, DEL-YVR at 0515, DEL-ORD at 0335, DEL-JFK at 0305, DEL-SFO at 0400. These times are even worse for passengers connecting from domestic services who effectively have to stay up awake all night on a short(ish) flight.
BOM-LHR at 0635 is not desirable for a premium route but is probably constrained by slot availability. It does however have a nice connection to the incoming Melbourne service at 0235 so could be justified on that basis. I could imagine getting a good night’s sleep on MEL-BOM, breakfast and shower in the lounge, then push through to bed time on arriving in London.
The North American flights with terrible departure times get back into India at mid-day, so their arrival times are not particularly desirable either. The JFK-DEL service arrives at 12:45 so unless the wait for immigration and baggage is very long, hotel check-in will not be open when people arrive.
The only justification I can see for these awful times on North America is that they arrive in America quite early in the day. This guarantees connections to other American cities. If Air India is able to start flying to more of these places with a larger fleet, the need for terrible departure times should not be so great and so the times may be shuffled around.
Option 4: single aisle to wide-body up-gauge to enhance the pax-ex
A number of routes currently scheduled to be operated by single-aisle could possibly justify an up-gauge to attract premium cabin travellers. These include BOM-SIN (10x flights per week each way), DEL-BKK (14x), BLR-SIN (7x) and BOM-BKK (7x). I would expect Air India to send their wide-body aircraft to North America and Australia first though.
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