In November, more than halfway into a five-year turnaround at Air India, chief executive Campbell Wilson reflected on the challenges of privatising a formerly state-owned airline and overseeing one of aviation history’s biggest jet orders.
“It has been a progressive thing, because at the end of the day we are still an airline and we still carry people in tubes 10 kilometres above the ground,” Wilson told the Financial Times in an interview. “So at the same time that you’re doing all of this change, you have to continue operating safely and robustly.”
Seven months later, the safety credentials of India’s flag carrier — and Wilson’s record as chief executive — are under intense scrutiny. Investigators are still probing what caused a London-bound Air India flight to crash in Ahmedabad shortly after take-off, killing more than 290 people.
Whatever Air India’s role, the incident is a severe blow for the airline and its owner Tata, which prides itself on an industrial portfolio that includes steel, carmaking and the assembly of iPhones.
“There will be compensation, legal suits, customer frustration,” said Neelam Mathews, an independent aviation analyst based in New Delhi. “In the short term at least, there’d be higher insurance premiums, and airfares, very importantly, are likely to go up.”
India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, which is leading the probe with help from US and UK counterparts, has given no indication of who or what might be to blame for India’s worst air disaster in almost three decades.
Independent experts have raised questions about the position of the plane’s wing flaps, thrust generated by its engines and why its landing gear remained down in the seconds before it crashed.
Investigators have found the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders. Boeing, which made the aircraft — a 12-year-old 787-8 Dreamliner — is involved in the investigation, as is GE Aerospace, which made its engines.
In another Air India incident on Monday, a Dreamliner bound for New Delhi returned to its origin in Hong Kong shortly after the pilot spotted a technical issue as it took off. The plane landed safely and its passengers were unharmed.
“We need to show resilience,” Tata chair N Chandrasekaran told staff at the airline’s Gurugram headquarters near Delhi on Monday. “We need to use this incident [in Ahmedabad] as an act of force to build a safer airline.”
Both Air India and Tata have offered compensation to the crash victims’ relatives and the sole surviving passenger. Wilson delivered remarks of condolence on Thursday, promising to put the needs of victims’ families first, but faced online backlash because his comments closely resembled those made by American Airlines chief Robert Isom after a crash that killed 67 people near Washington in January.
Air India did not respond to a request for further comment.
The crash in Ahmedabad is the biggest crisis in the three and a half years since Tata bought the airline from state ownership and began a drive to restore the reputation of a brand many Indians saw as a national embarrassment.
“The question now for Air India is how do they react,” said Andrew Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy, an air transport and government affairs consultancy. “If they respond well, this could be a galvanising moment that allows them to leave their chequered past behind them, but if they handle it badly it could be a disaster.”
Founded by industrialist JRD Tata as Tata Airlines in 1932, the company flew its first commercial flight that year — a mail run from Karachi to Mumbai, with a stop in Ahmedabad. It was nationalised in 1953, after India’s independence, and suffered the fate of many state-owned enterprises, falling into a state of mismanagement that India’s comptroller and auditor general called “dismal” in 2011.
When Tata bought the airline back from the state in a $2.4bn deal in 2022, Chandrasekaran and former chair Ratan Tata thanked the Indian government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the opportunity, saying they agreed with his vision of making aviation affordable for Indians.
Tata hired Wilson, a New Zealander, from Singapore Airlines, where he had set up the low-cost airline Scoot. At Air India, Wilson found a business deep in the red, with some planes parked on the ground and being raided for spare parts. Its IT systems were antiquated, with the airline still using an outdated mainframe reservation system and some staff using Gmail accounts to conduct company business, said Wilson.
“There were no job descriptions, there was no performance management, there was no consequence management,” he told the FT last year. “If there was an issue, there was a tendency to obscure it until it came to light.”
Air India’s new Tata-installed management invested $200mn in IT systems, recruited more than 9,000 new staff and placed a bumper order for 470 new Boeing and Airbus aircraft in a bid to turn it into a world-class airline.
Its finances began to improve, with revenue rising and losses narrowing under Wilson. But even before last week’s crash, analysts, regulators and some Air India customers had been raising doubts over whether the airline had truly changed.
Complaints persist over flight delays and cancellations, inadequate food and drink, and shabby interiors on older aircraft as Air India has struggled to secure older parts and new planes amid industry-wide delays. Akash Vatsa, a passenger on an earlier flight of the Dreamliner that crashed, posted online videos claiming the aircraft’s air-conditioning and in-flight entertainment systems were not functioning.
Since the Tata takeover, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation has repeatedly fined Air India over safety and other regulatory violations, including a Rs8mn ($95,658) penalty last year for exceeding flight duty time limits. At home, it is competing in a near-duopoly with IndiGo, which has been boosting its international long-haul routes.
In his address to staff on Monday, Tata chair Chandrasekaran insisted the airline would “get through this”, adding: “Our job is to get Air India into a better place.”
Aviation analysts are reserving judgment. “This would be tragic and difficult for an airline that didn’t have Air India’s history and wasn’t trying to climb out of it,” said John Strickland, an independent transport consultant. “Finding out what the cause of the crash was is going to be key.”
