Air India’s New CEO Wants More Widebody Jets and Plans to Move More Westbound Flights to Mumbai

NEW DELHI, India, 3 November 2026 – Air India wants to order more widebody aircraft, its new chief executive Tewolde Gebremariam said on Tuesday at the Aviation India and South Asia summit in New Delhi. He told the conference that the airline is in talks with Airbus and Boeing but declined to say how many jets it might buy, AeroTime and Business Today reported.

It was one of his first major public appearances since the Air India board named him on 5 August 2026 to succeed Campbell Wilson. Gebremariam ran Ethiopian Airlines Group for more than a decade before joining Air India, which is about 75% owned by the Tata Group and 25% by Singapore Airlines.

What the CEO said about new aircraft

No order was announced. “Our network, our strategy demands more,” Gebremariam said, as reported by The Hindu BusinessLine. He did not name the models or a timeline.

The new jets would come on top of a large existing order. Air India has placed orders for 600 new aircraft since it returned to Tata ownership in 2022, according to its August 2026 press release. Orders announced in 2023 and 2024 include 80 widebodies: 50 Airbus A350s, 20 Boeing 787s and 10 Boeing 777Xs, BusinessLine reports. The airline flies 61 widebodies today, AeroTime says. Our Air India fleet guide lists them type by type.

Winning back international passengers

Gebremariam said his immediate focus is to regain market share on routes between India and the rest of the world, a market in which, he said, Air India is under-represented despite strong demand. “Air India has been punching below its weight and that will change,” he said, as quoted by AeroTime. He also wants more passengers to connect between international flights at Air India’s Indian hubs.

In the short term the airline has had to shrink parts of its long-haul network. He said Air India has cut frequencies to European cities, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, and that aircraft will return to those routes once current problems ease, Business Today reported. He looked further ahead too: restoring Air India to its former standing will take 15 to 20 years, he said.

More westbound flights from Mumbai

The main problem for Delhi is airspace. Pakistan’s airspace remains closed to Indian airlines, which complicates long-haul flying, particularly from Delhi to Europe and North America. Gebremariam said Air India will move more of those services to Mumbai, where the closure has less effect, according to AeroTime. Delhi will keep serving the West, but will focus its growth on routes to the east and southeast, BusinessLine reports. AeroTime adds that the airline is also looking at Bengaluru as a third major hub.

Air India did not publish new schedules alongside the comments. Both Mumbai and Delhi already rank among the country’s busiest airports, as our guide to India’s largest airports shows.

Losses and the road to profit

Air India and Air India Express lost about Rs 22,000 crore (roughly $2.5 billion) in the financial year to March 2026, Business Today and AeroTime report. Gebremariam said the airline’s cost per seat-kilometre is still higher than its revenue per seat-kilometre, and that this has to change. He listed high fuel prices, the Pakistani airspace closure and geopolitical uncertainty among the pressures.

Asked when Air India would make money, he replied “very soon”, according to both AeroTime and BusinessLine. He also said he is more impatient for a profit than the airline’s shareholders are. Any new widebodies would take years to arrive, so for passengers the more immediate change is likely to be where Air India’s long-haul flights start, rather than the aircraft they fly on.

Read more

• Air India fleet explained: every aircraft type and order
• Airbus A350-900 review: the jet behind Air India’s order book
• The longest flights from India, and how Air India flies them
• The largest airports in India by passengers

Sources: AeroTime, 3 November 2026; Business Today, 3 November 2026; The Hindu BusinessLine, 3 November 2026; Air India press release on the CEO appointment (via Tata Group), 5 August 2026.

Featured image: FlyingFuel graphic using a photo of Air India Airbus A350-900 VT-JRB at London Heathrow by S5A-0043, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.