Highlight
- Air India on Sunday said it will bring back 10 of its grounded wide-body aircraft in service.
- Air India’s wide-body fleet currently consists of 43 aircraft, of which 33 are operational.
- The remaining aircraft will progressively return to service in early 2023.
Air India on Sunday said it will bring back 10 of its grounded wide-body aircraft in service by early 2023. A wide-body aircraft has a large fuel tank that allows it to travel on long-distance international routes such as Indo-US and India- Canada. “Air India’s wide-body fleet currently consists of 43 aircraft, of which 33 are operational. This is a significant improvement from the 28 aircraft that the airline was operating till recently,” the statement said.
The remaining aircraft will be progressively returned to service in early 2023. The carrier on Sunday announced that it will operate a daily flight between Delhi in India and Vancouver in Canada from August 31. At present, it operates the Delhi-Vancouver service thrice per week. The carrier said this increase in frequency on the Delhi-Vancouver route meets growing traffic between India and Canada, and has been enabled by the return of wide-body Boeing 777-300ER aircraft.
It said that Boeing is working closely with Air India, after its acquisition by the Tata Group, to restore the aircraft that was grounded for a long time due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other reasons.
“The progressive restoration of these aircraft has already allowed Air India to increase schedule flexibility and will allow further frequency and network to be increased in the coming months,” he added.
After successfully winning the bid for the airline on October 8 last year, the Tata group took over control of Air India on January 27. Air India’s newly-appointed CMD Campbell Wilson had in the last week of July asked the airline’s Integrated Operations Control Center (IOCC), which is the “nerve center” of any carrier, to report directly to it and make recommendations on it. that how to improve. -time display.
On Sunday, Wilson said in a statement that increasing the frequency on the Delhi-Vancouver route is the first step towards restoring Air India’s fleet and international network.