Seat manufacturing delays a growing issue for Air India

The CEO of Air India says an aircraft seat shortage is his biggest supply chain issue. Campbell Wilson told Bloomberg TV last week that seat manufacturers are struggling to design, certify, and produce seats at the needed volumes. His comments come as the flag carrier is part way through a programme of refurbishing around 100 aircraft. "In our case, the first and business class seats for both our big retrofit programmes have been delayed by upwards of six, and even twelve, months, which is very frustrating" he said. Wilson was speaking in the wake of Air India merging with Vistara and Air India Express merging with AIX Connect. "We're in the process of ensuring things stabilise, but the hard work really has been done," he said. "Air India has come, in the last two years, from a state of really quite poor repair. We've made a lot of progress." "The big work yet to be done is rehabilitating the older aircraft we inherited from the former owner," he added. "We're about a third of the way through re-fitting the narrowbody aircraft and we will complete that by mid-2025. In early 2025, we'll commence re-fitting 40 widebody aircraft, and that will take about two years to complete." In addition to issues with seat suppliers, Wilson said aircraft delivery delays were impacting Air India but were beyond its control. However, he said that the airline was attempting to mitigate the problem through various strategies, including leasing around 40 aircraft and opportunistic purchases of newly manufactured aircraft not taken up. "But there's a limited supply out there," he said. "The slowdown in production of Boeing aircraft has a flow-on effect. We're having to recalibrate our [delivery] expectations and plans."<br/>