How is Air India deploying its refurbished, new-build and ex-Vistara Dreamliners this winter? 

VT-AWD, Air India’s fourth linefit 787-9 Dreamliner landed in India earlier this week. This is the fourth linefit aircraft for the airline, joining the six former Vistara 787-9s and 26 787-8 Dreamliners of Air India. The legacy Dreamliners are undergoing refurbishments and refits along with heavy maintenance checks wherever due. Air India plans to complete the retrofit of all 26 aircraft by mid-2027, as per earlier announcements. 

The Northern Winter schedule will come into effect from October 25 this year. With November being the first full month of operations, I relied on data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, shared exclusively for this article to understand how Air India is deploying its better products in the market. 

Air India will fly its Boeing 787 fleet this winter as four distinct sub-fleets, each doing a different job. Refurbished 787-8s hold down a mix of one domestic trunk route and three long-haul sectors. New-build, line-fit 787-9s anchor a thin ultra-long-haul route, a high-frequency Gulf sector, and share Heathrow duties. Ex-Vistara 787-9s, the largest and highest-capacity of the three, are concentrated entirely on the two busiest European routes out of Delhi. Between them, the airline is running 156 weekly widebody departures across nine sectors, and no two sub-fleets share an identical mission. The fourth sub-fleet is the legacy Dreamliner.

Three sub-fleets, three different jobs

*VT-ANC and VT-ANQ are expected back in fleet soon

Frequencies are weekly, one-way, and mirrored in the return direction.

A fleet rebuilt in three separate waves

The first and newest set is Air India’s first genuinely bespoke widebody: line-fit 787-9s designed for Air India from the outset, with the first aircraft, VT-AWA, delivered in January 2026 and entering service on Mumbai-Frankfurt from 1 February. That aircraft’s early months were clouded by a seat-certification delay that kept 18 economy seats blocked from sale. These aircraft see deployment to Toronto from Delhi, London Heathrow from Mumbai and some flights to Dubai from Mumbai. 

The second set of Dreamliners arrived through the Vistara merger of November 2024. Vistara’s own 787-9 fleet, ordered independently and delivered from February 2020 onward, came into the combined airline with a three-class product distinct from anything Air India had built in-house. The six ex-Vistara 787-9s are doing the most concentrated job of all: two routes, both close to double-daily frequency. Delhi-Frankfurt runs 13 times weekly and Delhi-London Heathrow runs 17 times weekly. With 299 seats apiece, the ex-Vistara jets are also the largest aircraft in the three-way split, and Air India appears to be using that extra capacity precisely where European trunk demand is deepest, rather than spreading it thinly across the network.

The third set is the refurbished 787-8s, converted from dual class to three-class configuration. These aircraft will operate to Tokyo-Haneda from Delhi, complement the London Heathrow service on the 787-9 from Mumbai, and to Frankfurt from Mumbai, along with five times a week service to Bengaluru from Delhi, which would eventually see the Bengaluru – London flight shift to the refurbished aircraft.

Three different cabins for three different Dreamliners

The seating story lines up neatly with the deployment story, because no two sub-fleets fly the same product. The refurbished 787-8 carries 250 seats in three classes: 20 Business, 25 Premium Economy and 205 Economy, built around adding a mid-cabin to an airframe that flew for over a decade with just two classes. The line-fit 787-9, Air India’s own from-scratch design, carries 296 seats: 30 Business, 28 Premium Economy and 238 Economy, the newest hard product in the fleet, with Recaro seating throughout Premium Economy and Economy. The ex-Vistara 787-9 is the largest of the three at 299 seats: 30 Business, 21 Premium Economy and 248 Economy, a layout inherited unchanged from Vistara’s own design brief.

A Business class passenger gets 30 seats on either 787-9 variant but only 20 on the refurbished 787-8, while a Premium Economy passenger gets meaningfully more room to book on the line-fit 787-9’s 28-seat cabin than on the ex-Vistara jet’s smaller 21-seat cabin. On paper the three products look similar; in practice, availability and hard product vary by which registration happens to operate on a given day.

Network Thoughts

The refurbished 787-8 deployment goes up as the winter progresses and Air India inducts more of these planes. The deployment shows the markets which the airline is strong at or values more than the others. For example, the airline has gone out of its way in the last few years and continues to do so with flights to Frankfurt, having maintained a better product wherever and whenever possible and cutting down fewer flights, when compared to another European destination – Paris. This difference is due to the strong ties which Air India has with Lufthansa, vis a vis Air France or KLM and thus a better product helps price better and feed better to the long haul network of Lufthansa.

Similarly, flights to London, a traditionally strong route and station for Air India, were quick to see ramp up of a good product. Over the years, the airline has reduced services instead of increasing them as was thought. This is primarily due to the lack of aircraft, with all 777-200LRs being removed from the fleet and the airspace closure leading to longer block times for existing flights. 

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