Air India CEO & MD, Campbell Wilson at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2024
Air India CEO & MD, Campbell Wilson, at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2024spoke to CAPA TV at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2024, in Brisbane, about latest industry trends and company developments.
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Transcript
Campbell Wilson:India is already the 3rd largest domestic air travel market in the world, and by some measures also the 5th largest international air travel market in the world. What is unusual about India is it's a market that's growing at about 8 to 10% compound annual growth rate, so it is really becoming a sizable player in global aviation. If you add to that the fact that India is becoming more and more part of the global supply chain, it has the same geographic opportunity for international-to-international connectivity as the supercarriers in the Gulf or elsewhere. Really, the future of Indian aviation is quite significant, which is why Air India has purchased more than 470 aircraft, taking delivery at the rate of about one every six days, in order to capture this opportunity that in the past. Indian airlines have not really been fully seizing. The Tata Airline Group includes 4 airlines: Air India, Air India Express, the former AirAsia India, and Vistara, which was a joint venture with Singapore Airlines. We're in the process of amalgamating those airlines into one full-service airline and one low-cost airline. Both of those have been ongoing for about 18 months. We're now in the final stages of both. We're hoping to complete the legal and operational merger of the 2 low-cost airlines sometime in October and the 2 full-service airlines sometime in November. With that, it gives us commonality, scale, and obviously we can use the capabilities of Vistara and AirAsia to catalyse and accelerate the transformation of Air India and Air India Express. So it's been a lot of work, but we're nearing the end and very excited. Well, Air India has more than doubled its frequencies into Australia in the last 2 years, operating to both Sydney and Melbourne from Delhi and Mumbai. But we really see this as a very untapped market. We see the opportunity for increased frequencies to markets that we presently serve. We see the opportunities to serve new cities both in India and in Australia, because amongst the global opportunities Air India has, we see this sort of in that second or third tier of priority. At Air India, the challenge is not so much the number of opportunities we have, it's the number of aircraft we have to serve those opportunities. So we can't, can't wait for those 470 we've ordered to be delivered as quickly as possible.
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