Shares of Interglobe Aviation, which owns Indigo—India’s budget airline carrier and top market player—slumped by 3.8 per cent or ₹213 to hit as low as ₹5418 apiece, shortly after an Air India flight, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, crashed outside the Ahmedabad airport. While Air India has around 25 per cent of all Boeing aircraft in India, Indigo holds 2.5 per cent of them.
IndiGo, in May 2025, inked a damp lease with Norse Atlantic Airways for two additional Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft, bringing the total number under the partnership to 6, in a bid to kick off long-haul routes out of India by early 2026.
One Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft is already operating on IndiGo’s Delhi–Bangkok route since March 2025. Indigo also announced its first-ever long-haul route connecting Mumbai with Manchester in the United Kingdom starting July 1, 2025, which is set to feature a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft to operate thrice-weekly flights on the route.
New York Stock Exchange-listed Boeing shares slumped more than 6 per cent during the pre-market trade following news of the Ahmedabad crash.
The 737 Max crashes and how Boeing escaped criminal charges
This is not the first time Boeing has been under fire for crashes and alleged safety lapses. Back in January 2024, a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft shortly after takeoff.
In March 2019, airlines in India, China, Indonesia, Singapore and many countries grounded their Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft after all of the 57 passengers on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight were killed when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff. This happened less than 5 months after a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 went down off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018.
This triggered a global inspection of the Boeing aircraft then, leading to the discovery of major lapses in safety concerns, and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) took note.
However, the aircraft manufacturer reached a deal—an ‘agreement in principle’—with the DoJ that allowed it to avoid criminal prosecution despite allegedly misleading US regulators about the 737 Max. Under the deal, Boeing was set to shell out more than $1.1 billion (including an additional $445 million for the families of the crash victims). This bailout meant the US administration would dismiss fraud charges in the criminal case against Boeing.
How the Indian government would act on Boeing following the latest crash is yet to be seen. But Boeing seems to be returning to a pattern where quality checks are being allegedly flouted for profit.