“DIFFICULT DAY”
With its maharajah mascot, Air India was once renowned for its lavishly decorated planes and stellar service championed by its founder, JRD Tata, India’s first commercial pilot.
But since the mid-2000s, the carrier’s reputation has worsened as financial troubles mounted. It has flown widebody planes with business class seats in poor condition and grounded some of its new Boeing 787 Dreamliners for lack of spare parts.
When Tata regained control, the airline was “just in absolute shambles”, its CEO Wilson told Reuters in a 2024 interview, noting that some of its planes hadn’t had a product refresh since they were delivered in 2010-2011.
Air India, which has a 30 per cent share of the domestic passenger market, has a fleet of 198 planes, of which 27 are 10 to 15 years old and 43 are more than 15 years old, the civil aviation ministry told parliament in March. Air India Express had 101 planes, with 37 per cent of them more than 15 years old.
The plane that crashed on Thursday was 11 years old, according to Flightradar24.
Rival Indian airlines like IndiGo operate newer planes.
Air India, which is part-owned by Singapore Airlines, has placed orders for 570 new jets in recent years and is in talks for dozens more.
It has even aggressively expanded its international flight network in the face of the fury of its passengers, who often take to social media to show soiled seats, broken arm rests, non-operational entertainment systems and dirty cabin areas.
It has also been ranked the worst airline for flight delays in Britain, where its departures were on average just under 46 minutes behind schedule in 2024, according to analysis of Civil Aviation Authority data by the PA news agency published in May.
It has also been reporting losses since at least fiscal 2019-20. In 2023-2024, it reported a net loss of US$520 million on sales of US$4.6 billion.
Before it can make any further progress on these problems, however, it faces the difficult task of investigating one of India’s worst aviation disasters ever.
“This is a difficult day for all of us at Air India,” CEO Wilson said in a video message.
“Investigations will take time.”
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