The white tails are getting a dash of colour and the seats are going to be re-configured.

Air India Express – the Tata-owned low cost carrier – has started to rejig operations and spread its wings.

Aloke Singh, MD of the airline, articulates big expansion plans for Air India Express (or AIX) after the recent merger with Air Asia India.

The first part of the plan is to widen the fleet. “When we merged the two airlines (Air India Express and Air Asia India) we had 50 planes; this is now going to increase to 100 by the end of this fiscal,” he adds.

The current fleet has a mix of Boeing-737s and A-320s, both of which are the aviation industry’s workhorses for short-haul flights. The airline has drawn the planes from Air India and Air Asia India. Most of the Boeing-737s came from the Air India family while the A-320s were sourced from Air Asia.

“All of these will be configured into All-Economy,” says Singh, which means that each plane will have more than 180 seats.

The first challenge is to re-configure the seating because some of the planes have a Business Class format. “These were ordered for some other airline which did not eventually take them.” In aviation parlance, these are known as white tails. The term comes from the light-coloured primer used on the aircraft’s body to reflect sunlight and reduce corrosion.

The makeover for Air India Express (or AIX) has begun with the paint job on the tails of the aircraft that draws on the bold and vibrant textile designs from various regions in the country. The seat re-configuration will, however, start only next year.

Back in 2023, Air India had placed a $70 billion order for planes – 400 narrow-bodies (like B-737s and A-320s) and 70 wide-bodies (B-787 Dreamliners and B-777Xs). “A lot of those narrow bodies are coming into the Air India Express fleet,” the MD says.

The airline is also divvying up routes with Air India – the full-service airline within the group. “A lot of routes are being shuffled. It is part of a rationalisation process between Air India and Air India Express. So, routes that are better suited to our business mode — where the purpose for travel is more for leisure, for instance — will be operated by AIX. The premium routes will be operated by Air India,” Singh said at a recent interaction in Calcutta.

That is why the Dubai-Goa route – a typical leisure travel route – fell into AIX’s lap; earlier, it used to be operated by Air India.

AIX’s broad business strategy is to operate routes connecting the metros to Tier 2 and 3 cities — the “emerging hotspots” — that account for more than two-thirds of the addressable market. “That is the space that we want to occupy,” says Singh.

But there will be route overlaps with the full-service airline. AIX will continue to dominate operations in the Calcutta-Bengaluru route, for instance. But it will cede the premium routes like Delhi-Mumbai to the full-service airline. It does, however, operate only one flight on the Delhi-Mumbai route because of the airport slot constraints.

Bengaluru has been a hub for AIX and this will continue. Surat has emerged as a key focus area. It started operating flights from there to Delhi, Bengaluru and Sharjah. It now intends to start services from that city to Bangkok and Phuket.

“We don’t want to spread (our resources) too thin. We want to consolidate our presence …become strong in one market. We want to grow Surat to a certain size and then look at other markets,” he adds.

That opportunity will arise when the airports at Navi Mumbai and Jewar (in Greater Noida) start operations sometime next year. “When these airport open, we will look at a market like Calcutta … so a service from Navi-Mumbai to Calcutta fits right into our business model.”

Flight frequencies from Calcutta have gone up sharply in the past year. AIX now flies to 13 destinations from the city with 24 flights daily. It had to defer plans to start a flight to Dhaka because of the turmoil there. It intends to start a Calcutta-Kathmandu flight in next year’s summer schedule. It has already launched flights to Agartala and Port Blair out of Calcutta and aims to start two new services to Dimapur and Patna.

Bhubaneswar is the other city in the East from where AIX has launched flights to what Singh terms “unique destinations”: Jaipur, Lucknow, Kochi and Patna.

Overseas ambitions

The arc of AIX’s ambitions is only circumscribed by the distance that the short-haul planes can fly. “Our range is about 5.5-6 hours from India. That is the maximum that the B-737 or the A-320s can do… So, it will be Bangkok, Singapore in the East; in the West, it will be Kuwait and Jeddah. We won’t go beyond that,” says Singh.

But it doesn’t stop there. AIX intends to go to CIS countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in two years’ time. It could also go as far afield as Vietnam.

There has been growing resentment among passengers over sky-high airfares during the festival season and towards the end of the year. But Singh baulks at the idea of price regulation, insisting that the fares are fair if people buy their tickets long before departure. He reckons that people can even obtain tickets at prices that are below the airline’s marginal cost if they book smart. High fuel prices skew the costs for airlines in the country which are struggling to stay profitable.

Singh claims that the one big innovation that AIX has introduced is the zero baggage fare. The idea is based on the principle of unbundling the various components of travel facilities, which gives the passengers the opportunity to cherry-pick the ones they want. That may be one way to attract passengers in an extremely competitive market.