Four airports, five sectors and 57 flights – Air India’s jugglery to improve metro flights

Last month Vistara, the Tata SIA joint venture merged with Air India. As the merger neared, and questions were raised about the difference in service levels between the two airlines, Air India published its plan of letting Vistara planes and crew operate the same service until early 2025. The former Vistara aircraft and service would have a “2” prefix on the flight numbers. Ironically, on the very first day of the merger, a couple of flights were already operating with the legacy Air India aircraft but with a special “2” prefix, starting the confusion.

Within weeks of merger, the airline announced changes to its metro network with the three-class former Vistara aircraft primarily deployed on the five metro sectors viz. Delhi – Mumbai, Delhi – Bengaluru, Delhi – Hyderabad, Mumbai – Bengaluru and Mumbai – Hyderabad sectors. The changes were effective December 01, 2024 and with these changes, it also made changes to flight timings. Vistara’s initial schedule was built with competition in mind and at a time when Air India was competition and not family. The merger meant that overnight there were flights going to the same destination at the same time or within minutes of each other, creating challenges with pricing, confusion for passengers and limiting the spread to take on competition.

Data shared by Cirium – an aviation analytics company, exclusively for this article shows the length at which Air India has gone to ensure a seamless shift and a spread out schedule to cater to the passengers.

On the busiest Delhi – Mumbai – Delhi sector, where Air India is now the capacity and frequency leader after the merger, the airline has changed timings for seven flights each way. This included flights which left at the same time, like two flights leaving for Delhi from Mumbai at 1150 hours or within a span of a few minutes, spacing it with a 45 minute interval or beyond. The analysis also shows a minor drop in capacity on the back of one red-eye flight being dropped. On the Delhi – Bengaluru – Delhi sector, the second busiest in the country and also the one where Air India now has a leg up against IndiGo in terms of capacity and frequency, the airline has made changes to seven out of its 18 departures to have a schedule which is well spaced out. On the Mumbai – Bengaluru – Mumbai route, the changes were more intense as the network was more close to each other in terms of timings. Eight out of 11 flights have seen a change in timings to better space it across the day in Bengaluru – Mumbai, while three of eleven are changed on the Mumbai – Bengaluru sector.

On the Delhi – Hyderabad – Delhi sector, five out of eleven flights have seen a change in timings. This now sees a higher concentration of flights in the morning and evening hours. On the Mumbai – Hyderabad – Mumbai sector, which is also the smallest in terms of presence amongst the five sectors for Air India, the Mumbai – Hyderabad schedule sees a change of four out of nine flights while the return sees changes to a significant six out of nine flights.


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The airline has a schedule for 119 daily flights between these sectors and to make changes to 57 of these is a herculean task because two of these airports – Delhi and Mumbai are congested to an extent that not only are new slots nearly impossible to come by, even changing timings is a challenge because of high utilisation of existing slots.

With a strong and large portfolio, some of the changes may have come from its own slot portfolio for the airline – a practice which is fairly common at followed by all large airlines at their hubs, but the speed with which this was achieved indicates that while the public was being told about the same flights and service levels, in the background strong work was being done to swiftly make changes which are more beneficial from a revenue and market perspective.

Tail Note
Air India continues to be in the news for all the wrong reasons, but the frequency of such events has gone down over the last few months. The standardisation of offering on the route bodes well for some of its other features like “Fly early” where in the same cabin class service will be available.

The schedule spread will improve over the next few seasons with the airline now having an opportunity to ask for slots at all airports as a combined entity, giving better negotiating power amongst other benefits. Can the airline make the most of this jugglery in terms of revenue? This shift has come at a cost and that cost is withdrawing erstwhile Vistara planes from other sectors where the three class will be replaced by two class Air India aircraft or at times mono class planes. Will those be the sectors where passengers will shift to competition or the lure of metros is too high to overlook such a scenario?

Special Note

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