The CEO of Air India (AI, Delhi International) says an aircraft seat shortage is his biggest supply chain issue. Campbell Wilson told Bloomberg TV last week that seat manufacturers are struggling to design, certify, and produce seats at the needed volumes. His comments come as the flag carrier is part way through a programme of refurbishing around 100 aircraft.

"In our case, the first and business class seats for both our big retrofit programmes have been delayed by upwards of six, and even twelve, months, which is very frustrating" he said.

Wilson was speaking in the wake of Air India merging with Vistara and Air India Express merging with AIX Connect. "We're in the process of ensuring things stabilise, but the hard work really has been done," he said. "Air India has come, in the last two years, from a state of really quite poor repair. We've made a lot of progress."

"The big work yet to be done is rehabilitating the older aircraft we inherited from the former owner," he added. "We're about a third of the way through re-fitting the narrowbody aircraft and we will complete that by mid-2025. In early 2025, we'll commence re-fitting 40 widebody aircraft, and that will take about two years to complete."

In addition to issues with seat suppliers, Wilson said aircraft delivery delays were impacting Air India but were beyond its control. However, he said that the airline was attempting to mitigate the problem through various strategies, including leasing around 40 aircraft and opportunistic purchases of newly manufactured aircraft not taken up. "But there's a limited supply out there," he said. "The slowdown in production of Boeing aircraft has a flow-on effect. We're having to recalibrate our [delivery] expectations and plans."

Air India's 212 aircraft include ten A319-100s, seven A320-200s, 101 A320-200Ns, thirteen A321-200s, thirteen A321-200NX, one A321-200NY(XLR), six A350-900s, eight B777-200LRs, nineteen B777-300ERs, twenty-seven B787-8s, and seven B787-9s. However, according to ch-aviation fleets data, Air India also has 274 aircraft on order, including seventy A320-200Ns, 140 A321-200NX, fourteen A350-900s, twenty A350-1000s, ten B777-9s, and twenty B787-9s.

"One of the consequences of a lack of capital in the past was a lack of capacity, particularly in long-haul aircraft," said Wilson. "India as a country had 43 widebody aircraft in service when Air India was privatised two years ago. We've since made a significant order of nearly 500 aircraft a couple of years ago to bring that needed capacity to the market."

"That means we are going to be deploying these widebody aircraft to many parts of the world," he said. "Air India's connectivity to North America, Europe, Australasia, and Asia was far short of what the market can sustain, and we're trying to rectify that. But that's a function of aircraft deliveries."