We are committed to be world class: Air India CEO Campbell Wilson
Air India completes two years under the Tata group’s ownership, its CEO Campbell Wilson has found that his job is mostly a balance between fighting the airline’s existing legacy issues and exploiting its tremendous future potential.
In a recent interview, Wilson spoke to ET about the progress Air India is making in its long, arduous journey to regaining its long-lost status as a globally relevant airline. Edited excerpts:
Q1) Let’s start with Air India’s transformation project. The first phase was taxi, which was focussed on legacy issues. The airline is six months into the next phase which is called takeoff, which is focused on developing the platforms, processes and systems needed to build a product of exellence. Where is Air India at right now and how do the next 100 days look like?
Ans: We have a five-year roadmap called Vihaan, which has three phases.
The first one was the “taxi” phase, which was until March of 2023, where we were really triaging and trying to address all of the accumulated issues of the past.
This current phase, which you rightly note we're halfway through, is where we're building all of the platforms and capabilities to support very aggressive growth. That includes the 470 aircraft that we announced earlier this year, and putting a lot of the platforms in place.
We've also launched the new brand of Air India, which will manifest across the network very soon. And we've started taking delivery at a very rapid rate.
We are now taking an aircraft on average every six days and we'll continue to do so for about the next 18 months.
Over the next hundred days, we see the first Airbus A350 come into the Indian skies in new brand colors. We see the new website and app. There are many things we will
