Aircraft deliveries and inductions now likely to resume, say experts

Although airlines will be inducting new planes, these will mostly be replacements, experts said

As domestic passenger traffic nears pre-Covid levels in India, aircraft deliveries and inductions put on hold due to the pandemic are expected to resume and accelerate, experts said.

There are 710 aircraft flying on domestic routes. Although airlines will be inducting new planes, it will mostly be replacements and not new purchases, experts said. (HT File)

There are 710 aircraft flying on domestic routes. Although airlines will be inducting new planes, it will mostly be replacements and not new purchases, experts said. However, the Indian aviation sector is likely to be benefitted both through fleet expansion and inducting fuel-efficient aircraft by replacing old ones, they said.

Budget carrier SpiceJet will be inducting 50 B737Max aircraft by March 2023, chairman and managing director Ajay Singh said at a recent event, without specifying the total number of planes likely to be added to its fleet. Besides B737MAX, SpiceJet also uses Bombardier Q400 aircraft. Full-service carrier Vistara, a joint venture between India’s Tata Group and Singapore Airlines, aims to have around 70 aircraft by 2023, up from the current 49, industry insiders said, but declined to be named.

Even so, it’s not certain that the recovery in domestic travel demand will hasten fleet expansions of Indian carriers because the pace was slackening even before the pandemic disruption, experts said.

India’s scheduled airlines will together have over 1,000 aircraft, up from the current 710, civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said last week.

“Aircraft induction was essentially augmenting supply to meet growing demand,” said Dhiraj Mathur, former partner at PwC, a consultancy. “Currently, air demand has picked up and continues to grow.”

“We plan to ramp up with the 350 plane order, which starts at the end of 2023 and, therefore, 2022 will be a sort of plateau,” said a spokesperson of budget carrier IndiGo.

The Gurugram-based air carrier had announced plans to phase out all its A320 CEO planes with the more fuel-efficient A320NEO aircraft. IndiGo has 61 A320 CEOs in its fleet and has phased out around 60% of them between April 2020 and September 2021. All such planes will be phased out by financial year 2022-23, its spokesperson said. Vistara had leased nine Boeing 737 planes in 2019 from the lessors of Jet Airways after the latter was grounded in April 2019.

The two airlines preparing to start operations are Akasa promoted by Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Jet 2.0 promoted by Jalan Kalrock Consortium.