A350, Airbus’s new flagship aircraft, could well be the next gen ‘Jumbo Jet’ of the Indian skies, with Air India announcing on Friday that it has concluded the acquisition of its first A350 plane.
This is India’s first A350 aircraft, and part of Air India’s record order for 470 planes placed back in June.
The A350 is Airbus Industrie’s challenger to the popular Boeing 787, better known as the ‘Dreamliner’, and a replacement for its pricey flagship A380 ‘super jumbo’. Initially developed as a modification to its wide-bodied A330 aircraft in the early 2000s, Airbus quickly switched to a clean-sheet 'eXtra Wide Body’ design, powered by two Rolls-Royce turbofan engines. The aircraft model A350-900 (the one Air India currently has) variant first entered service through Qatar Airways in 2015, followed by the even bigger A350-1000 entering service in 2018.
This is only Air India’s first A350, and is part of a larger order which includes a further forty A350s — six of them A350-900 and 34 of them A350-1000.
The transaction makes Air India the first scheduled carrier to have acquired an aircraft from an entity registered in Gujarat’s GIFT City, leased through International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and facilitated by AI Fleet Services Limited, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Air India and a GIFT IFSC-registered finance company.
“This landmark transaction is a shot in the arm for the development of a robust aviation ecosystem in India. As a flag-bearer of the country, Air India is happy to support the government of India’s efforts to develop an aircraft leasing hub in GIFT IFSC,” said Nipun Aggarwal, chief commercial and transformation officer, Air India.
The first of Air India’s six Airbus A350-900 is expected to arrive in India by the end of this year, with the remaining aircraft scheduled for deliveries through March 2024. In addition to the Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000 aircraft, Air India's order of 470 new aircraft include 20 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, 10 Boeing 777X widebody aircraft, as well as 140 Airbus A320neo, 70 Airbus A321neo and 190 Boeing 737MAX narrowbody aircraft.
In the race for preeminence as the world’s top aircraft manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing have fought several bitter battles between models. While the Airbus A320, incidentally the most common aircraft you will find at Indian airports, matched wing to wing with the Boeing 737, the American company tipped the scales in its favour in the sixties with the Boeing 747, which transformed long-distance air travel and was soon christened the ‘jumbo jet’.
While Airbus’s responses, like the A330 and A300, couldn’t match up, it managed to turn the tables with its massive A380 aircraft over the past two decades or so. While Emirates and Lufthansa flew A380 super jumbos into the country from Dubai and Frankfurt respectively, no Indian airline operated it domestically or on international routes — Kingfisher Airlines did order many A380s, but it came to naught as Mallya’s flying baby soon went belly up.
However, Covid and the change in aviation trends now mean that nimble aircraft models that focus on saving fuel, reducing emissions even while being adaptable to the ebb and flow of passenger demand, are the key. A350 is very much Airbus’s ace up its sleeve, something Air India, and soon other Indian airliners like Indigo, will turn into a common sighting on desi tarmacs.
