In February 2023, Vistara inducted its first of four A321LR into its fleet. The induction enabled the airline to start operations to Mauritius from Mumbai, followed by flights to Denpasar, Bali from Delhi in December 2023. Back then, I had termed it as the route of the year and it indeed turned out to be a blockbuster route for the airline. Vistara upgraded the route to the Dreamliner within months from March 2024 which continued until the merger with Air India when the Dreamliner continued albeit with the legacy Air India one. Eventually as Air India expanded, the aircraft was swapped back to the A321LRs.
Starting December 01, 2025; coinciding with two years of launch of flights to Bali, the airline will add more frequencies to Bali from Delhi, along with adding frequencies to Manila, a route it launched recently in October. With these two additions, the utilisation of the four A321LRs in Air India’s fleet will be at an all time high.
The four A321LR
Vistara inducted the four A321LR between February and May 2023. While it progressively started to expand, the utilisation of the planes was nowhere close to what it was intended to be with the “LR”. Till date, these four remain the only “LR”s in Indian skies. Interestingly, IndiGo operates some routes on the A320neo which are longer than some of the routes operated by the A321LR by Air India.
However, that is set to change starting December 01, with Delhi – Bali becoming a 10x weekly operation from current 7x, and Delhi – Manila becoming a 7x weekly operation from current 5x. Air India also operates to Mauritius from Mumbai as a daily service.
The airline will now have 48 weekly flights which will need the A321LR, seeing 344 hours of flying per week with these routes. This translates to 12 hours and 20 minutes of average flying per day. This also leaves room for three more days of flying, namely Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday along with most of Friday, with a potential to add more “LR” routes. However, these slots will also be needed for maintenance, swapping the aircraft from Mumbai, with the one in Delhi for maintenance purposes amongst others. This likely means that the airline will still have some time available to route the plane to Singapore, as it currently does. However, with one aircraft in Mumbai and the flights to Manila and Denpasar not in the same bank, an easy swap or a daily swap is not possible in true sense like it is for the European bank on the Dreamliners.
Network Thoughts
Vistara had intended to operate to Kenya and Vietnam from Mumbai, which was announced by CSMIA and had also shown up on the website of the airport. However the airline did not start operations, possibly as the integration with Air India was in the works in the background.
If there is one destination missing from Delhi Airport’s list of “Must haves” in the region, I will call it out as Jakarta, Indonesia and the A321LR is possibly the perfect to test the route. Will Air India take the plunge or new routes are lower on the priority list with frequency additioning and strengthening operations taking higher priority?
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