The transformation of Air India, now a Tata product, is one of the most talked-about aspects of international aviation. It’s a huge transformation process that’s going to take several years and is far from done. Along with new acquisitions, there have been new challenges as well, and the airline is dealing with them. There are new fleet acquisitions, a new culture in place at Air India, and a transformation program called Vihaan. To tell us a bit about that, we have the COO and MD of Air India. Thank you very much, Mr. Wilson, for being with us. I spoke to you a couple of years back. It’s an interesting time with Vistara and Air India integrating; they’re now entirely integrated. But there are those who say that Vistara was a wonderful product with a wonderful reputation, so is the legacy of Vistara not being diluted?
Well, I think more to the point, Vistara allows Air India the opportunity to be catalyzed and the transformation accelerated, and a new airline representing the best of both Vistara and the legacy of Air India to be born. It was always part of the plan to bring the four Tata airlines together. It was necessary for many reasons, not least of which are economies of scale, profitability, and the ability to further grow, and to build an Air India that represents the India that people expect to see around the world, an airline that reflects the warmth and hospitality of India. So it’s been a big project, a long project, but I think the team has worked very hard, and it’s nice to have the merger phase of that behind us.
Yeah, would you say the merger is actually behind you? Because there are different work cultures, whether it’s cabin crew or flight crew coming in. Has that been a challenge in terms of adaptation or bringing together different work cultures?
Well, we spent two years in the preparation and execution of this merger, aligning all the operating procedures, regulatory compliances and manuals, IT systems, terms and conditions of employment, physical locations, and so on. It hasn’t happened overnight; it’s been a very progressive process. For the moment, we are operating Vistara aircraft with Vistara crew so that the customer product experience is what they expect. But progressively, we will bring everything together into a coherent whole. That process will take time. One reason we’ve held back a bit on the Air India culture development program is that we wanted the people from Vistara, AirAsia India, and Air India Express to be part of co-creating it so they feel ownership. That’s something we’ll evolve into in 2025, uniting the organization behind the common mission of the Air India group. I think people are bought into it anyway. It’s the national name, a 93-year-old airline that’s growing massively with plenty of opportunity. We have the right ingredients; we just need to bring them together.
And yet you did have some problems. For example, cabin crew decided at one stage on Air India Express that they wouldn’t fly, hundreds of flights got canceled. You had problems with pilots at Vistara saying they had problems as well, and hundreds of flight cancellations on both airlines. How was that a huge challenge for you in the year that’s gone by?
Well, put it in context. There are 30,000 employees in the new Air India group. There were actually five groups of employees because the Indian Airlines-Air India merger was never fully consummated. We had to bring all of this together. In the global context, airline mergers can take five to seven years; this has been done in a little over two. When you bring different employee groups and different terms and conditions together, you don’t pick the best of everything, but neither do you pick the worst. There’s a mix of pluses and minuses. Some people can say this is better, some this is worse, but on balance I am absolutely convinced that it is better for each individual group. More so, the opportunity available to people is much greater than ever before simply because we have so many aircraft and such ambition to grow and improve the product. The opportunity for personal and career development is unparalleled.
And yet there are problems that suddenly emerged. Social media has been a nightmare for all airlines. You have flight crew or cabin crew complaining and saying, look, this is a broken aircraft, and there have been some Facebook posts of late that are deeply problematic. They aren’t serving even a proper glass of water. You’re a forward-facing industry and a public-facing one. When you have challenges like that from your own staff, does it not represent a huge challenge?
Well, ideally, our cabin crew and staff want to operate a product they are proud of, that allows them to provide the service they want to provide. It’s fair to say that particularly the legacy aircraft we inherited were not up to that standard, and it takes a long time. We committed $400 million to buy the seats to refurbish those aircraft. The seats have been in the certification and manufacturing process since then. They will start to be installed on the widebody aircraft next year. About a third of the narrowbody fleet are already done, but it will take a while to bring the legacy aircraft up to that standard. Having said that, we have a third of the widebody fleet either brand new in the case of the 350s or with modern interiors with the 777s, and those have a fantastic customer experience. But I also want to speak a bit about culture. We have passengers who write in and say flights are delayed, or we had P. Chidambaram, the former finance minister, and Adnan Sami with complaints. I know this is true of all airlines, not just Air India, but I sense people are impatient for better results—more on-time performance, better service on board, better food. I know what Air India will ultimately look like, but how would you address the present concerns of passengers?
Air India used to be fairly heavily unionized. Large corporates have problems with unions for various reasons. When the problem with Air India Express arose, certain unions representing cabin crew clashed with the corporate values of Air India and what you felt was required to enhance efficiency. Was that again a challenge for you in dealing with unions, which has been part of the culture of this airline?
Irrespective of unionization, what was the root cause of people’s concern? That’s been something we’ve been looking at across the entire transformation program. There were work practices, absence of job descriptions in the old Air India, absence of due process and performance management. The remuneration wasn’t at market levels, benefits weren’t market level, promotion and progression opportunities and training were not what we felt necessary. We’ve invested in and improved all of those. Are there areas where people think we should go further? By all means, that’s a discussion to have. But over the last couple of years, the employee proposition at the Air India group, and particularly the opportunity looking forward, is a light-year shift. We’re committed to making Air India a place where people want to work, want to stay, and want to build a career.
Yeah, there was a concern that turned up in the media about flight crew on long-haul flights saying that the number of hours they rest compulsorily might result in reduced salaries. Is that true?
I’m not entirely sure of the commentary you’re talking about. It was something raised to the DGCA by Air India, as I understand. There is a discussion on the flight duty time limitations that the DGCA oversees, and there are obviously different perspectives. India doesn’t yet adopt what is an international standard of a fatigue risk management system, which is a much more data-driven, sophisticated approach to managing fatigue risk. It’s still quite prescriptive with hard lines. The discussion, if I’m correct, involved how India should align with international best practice and the pros and cons. Beyond that, I wasn’t present, so I don’t really know.
Right, let’s talk a bit about the refurbishment of the fleet, because I think that is the biggest demand from passengers. Even on your long-haul aircraft, the product is old and damaged inside. It’s not your fault per se; it’s an industry lack of availability of components for refurbishment. What is the status of that?
As I said, one-third of the widebody fleet is now modernized, either with new aircraft or aircraft with modern interiors that we’ve leased. They are probably the ones the customer is most concerned about because they’re in them longer. We committed $400 million to new seats in 2022 and chose the seats. Since then, we’ve been working to certify and have them produced and ultimately installed. Two different seat suppliers, reflecting the post-COVID supply chain, came to us and said the dates they committed to deliver they can no longer meet; there’s a delay of six months in one case and a bit longer in another. A retrofit program that was going to start on both our 787s and 777s is now pushed to starting in 2025. It’s frustrating, but unfortunately it is what it is. We don’t have control over that. Many other airlines are affected by similar constraints. The first ship set of 787 seats comes in April, they will be installed in the aircraft, the aircraft will go through a certification program, and hopefully it’s back into service in October of next year. After that, we can accelerate a couple of aircraft every month. The 777 delay is a bit longer; we’ll have an interim refresh during 2025 and then go through the full interior refit in 2026. So we’re looking at the end of 2026 for the refurbishment to be well underway.
Would that be correct for both these aircraft types?
Well underway, if not close to completion, for the narrowbody aircraft by the middle of 2025. We’ve started that with our A320 fleet.
How would you respond to those who say that Vistara has a great product on their A320 and A321 fleet, and that the Air India refurbished aircraft or the existing ones may not quite match that? Would there be parity in terms of quality in the refurbished domestic product?
For the refurbished ones, yes. Although there’s a small subset of Vistara aircraft configured for international operations that have a slightly different configuration. We’re cognizant that the Vistara aircraft are newer and were fitted out at a higher spec than legacy Air India. So we’ve made the decision that from the first of December, all metro routes in India will be operated with Vistara aircraft. That’s 27 flights a day between Delhi and Mumbai, and dozens of flights between other metros—more than a thousand flights a week exclusively with the Vistara product, under Air India flight numbers. That’s an acknowledgement that for those premium metro routes, we want to offer a consistent, high-quality proposition. It’s a first manifestation of the benefit of the merger.
I noticed my hometown of Kolkata is missing from your list of aircraft with the better interiors. It’s just a matter of time? Because as I said, by the middle of 2025 the whole full-service narrowbody fleet will have been upgraded. I know that safety is obviously your primary concern, and yet we’ve had instances when you’ve been fined a couple of times by the DGCA for crew not being properly trained to operate certain flights. Why is this happening? Why has it happened more than once?
Each thing has a different cause. Sometimes it’s legacy practice, sometimes it’s a matter of human oversight, sometimes it’s a systemic gap that hasn’t been addressed or mitigated through another means. We open ourselves for audit every six months, and we invite external audits by IATA or other parties. That’s done with a mission of getting better. Each thing identified in these audits is an opportunity to improve. It’s something we need to keep at and spend time on.
