Air India: Which are the Longest Routes in the Network?

Air India has been attracting a lot of attention. The airline was state owned for much of the last decades has returned to the industrial powerhouse TATA. As a result of the privatization the airline has undergone a merger with the other TATA owned airline Vistara. You can read all about that in this other post of mine. The new entity that emerged from the merger has huge ambitions and is looking to affirm itself as a leader in the global aviation sector. There is much work yet to be done, however, while Air India rebuilds its operations let's explore which are the carrier's current longest flights.

Which Are Air India's Longest Routes? – North America Dominates

India and Air India have a clear ambition to become a primary actor in global aviation. The intention is to increasingly have passengers transferring through its main hubs onto destinations within Asia and beyond. For the time being though, the primary demographics the airline is serving are expats and businessmen.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that the airline's longest routes are to a region that both entertains strong economic ties with India and is home to a substantial number of Indian expats, North America.

All of Air India's 10 longest flights serve North American cities. Let's dive straight into which these are and the distances the Air India fleet of long-range aircraft must cover:

It must be noted that despite many airlines, including US carrier, are banned from flying over Russian airspace Air India doesn't face this issue. India hasn't cut diplomatic and commercial ties with Russia and therefore its carriers can still overfly the country. That means that Air India's longest routes are not impacted in anyway by the airspace closures as is the case for European and US airlines.

With all of that out of the way here are the figures of Air India's longest routes.

The Peculiarity of Air India's Longest Routes – A Multipronged Approach

Air India's operations are extremely fascinating and derive from India's demographic distribution. Rather than concentrating all long and ultra long-haul operations in one airport and city India has chosen to have a multipronged approach as other large countries have. Think of the US and Australia.

Because of the size of the country and the massive populations of several cities the most logical solution is to distribute long haul operations from multiple airports rather than overwhelm one. Those airports are Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. For the time being these are the only airports with long range services and coincide with Air India's main transit hubs.

Using All Long-Range Capable Planes on These Routes

The airline is deploying the full assortment of long-range capable aircraft it possesses in its fleet. Some of these planes are only temporarily serving these flagship routes as the new better equipped aircraft are rapidly joining the Indian national carrier's fleet, such as the Airbus A350-900.

The A350-900 currently regularly flies to the two New York area international airport (JFK and Newark Liberty). Gradually, as more aircraft of the type join the Air India fleet, we'll see this plane have a stronger presence on north american routes.

Also, without a doubt older less comfortable Boeing 787s and 777s will be replaced by new Dreamliner arrivals and eventually (hopefully not too far down the road) by Boeing 777Xs Air India also has on order.