New Delhi:
Air India on Wednesday received the first of its legacy Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft after heavy refresh and the refresh of the remaining 12 planes is expected to be completed by year-end, according to officials.
Since the refit of the legacy B777 aircraft, which was to start last year, has been delayed due to supply chain issues, the airline decided to go for heavy refresh of these planes.
Heavy refresh of an aircraft includes having new carpets, seat covers, cushions and fixing broken seats.
Air India has a total of 40 legacy wide-body planes — 13 B777s and 27 B787s.
The heavy refresh of the B777-300 ER was done in Singapore and completed in around 50 days. The heavy refresh of all the legacy B777s is expected to be completed by the end of this year, the officials said.
The refreshed aircraft will be deployed on the domestic route for one or two days and later for ultra-long operations.
The B777s are mainly deployed for ultra long haul flights connecting Toronto, Vancouver (Canada) and San Francisco, Chicago, Newark and New York (US).
Ultra-long haul flights are those having a duration of over 14 hours.
Air India has 13 legacy Boeing 777-300 ERs in its fleet of 198 planes. Some of these legacy planes have first-class cabins.
There are a total of 67 wide-body aircraft in the fleet — 19 B777-300 ERs (including 6 leased from Etihad Airways), 8 B777-200 LRs (including 5 leased from Delta Air Lines), 27 legacy B787-8s, 7 B787-9s and 6 A350-600s.
The first legacy B787 will be flying out for retrofit in April.
The airline also has narrow-body planes — 14 A321 neos, 13 A321 ceos, 94 A320 neos, 4 A320 ceos and 6 A319s.
Last month, Air India MD and CEO Campbell Wilson said the airline expects to complete the upgradation of all legacy wide body aircraft by mid-2027.
Under the USD 400 million retrofit programme for narrow-body and wide body planes, the first retrofitted A320 neo aircraft is already back in operations. The airline expects to refit all of the 27 A320 neo aircraft by the third quarter of this year.
While talking about the supply situation, Wilson had also said there were pinch points everywhere such as there are no engines for some narrow-body aircraft, there are issues with seat suppliers as well as availability of components and parts of fuselage.
“Reality is that it is going to remain a supply-constrained market, not just for Air India, India, (I am) talking about worldwide… for another 4-5 years,” he had said.
In the context of the supply chain woes, he had also said, “We are victims of the circumstances as is every other airline”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
