On 27 January 2022, the government sold its beleaguered airline Air India to the Tata Group. Four years later, the airline is in better shape, on a path of consolidation, growth, and repair. Yet the pace of that turnaround, amid generally favourable industry conditions, has fallen short of management’s expectations. A key setback was the crash of an Air India international flight in Ahmedabad in June 2025.
But even without that tragedy, data shows that Air India and its low-cost subsidiary, Air India Express, have grown more slowly than their main rival, IndiGo, and are far from challenging its dominance.
Domestic air pockets
India’s domestic aviation market has steadily expanded. The year the Tatas acquired Air India was still a recovery period after covid-related shutdowns, but 2023 saw about 152 million passengers on domestic flights, rising to roughly 161 million in 2024. Estimates for 2025 suggest 165-170 million passengers.
Air India Express has steadily gained, crossing a 10% passenger share for the first time in 2025. Air India’s domestic share, however, slipped after cutting frequencies on select routes following the June crash. IndiGo, meanwhile, faced operational challenges due to pilot shortages under new regulations.
A clearer long-term view comes from comparing market share between 2022 and 2024. Over this period, the Air India duo gained 4.2 percentage points, while market leader IndiGo added 5.9 points, on a larger base.
International turbulence
The international segment has seen similar trends. Passenger numbers rose from 28.4 million in 2023 to 32.7 million in 2024, with 2025 expected to reach around 36 million. Indian carriers’ combined market share now stands at roughly 46%.
In 2025, following its plane crash, Air India cut back capacity on some long-haul routes, resulting in a marked drop in its 2025 share. Here too, a truer comparison is between 2022 and 2024, where the Air India duo gained 1.2 percentage points in passenger share, while IndiGo gained 2 percentage points.
Distance is another variable in the international segment. Air India operates more wide-body aircraft, which travel longer distances and have a higher seating capacity. Thus, its share of passenger revenues is higher than its share of passengers. For example, among Indian airlines in 2024, Air India had a 35.9% share of passengers, but a 53.1% share of passenger-kilometre.
Ageing fleet
The June 2025 plane crash has been a setback for Air India. It is in the midst of a five-year-old, ambitious, and multi-pronged transformation titled Vihaan.ai, which began in September 2022. The significant pieces of this plan include buying new planes, retrofitting old ones, integrating multiple airlines, expanding to new routes, adding more operational staff, and investing more in other building blocks like training and maintenance.
It placed a multi-year order of 470 new aircraft with both Boeing and Airbus in 2023, and added another 100 in 2024. Its deliveries, however, have trailed those of IndiGo. Boeing delivered Air India 26 planes in 2024 and 15 in 2025. Meanwhile, in 2025, Airbus delivered 49 planes to IndiGo, nearly one a week.
Both Air India and Air India Express need new planes to expand and win passenger share, as well as to improve their fleet specs. At their current average age of 8.6-8.8 years, their fleets are among the oldest among Indian airlines.
Pilot’s seat
Another area where Air India has had to catch up in a significant way is strength of pilots. Between March 2016 and March 2022, this count for Air India dropped from 1,411 to 1,116. For Air India Express, it inched up from 269 to 333.
Meanwhile, IndiGo ramped up from 1,747 to 3,791. Since then, though, both airlines from the Air India stable have hired aggressively, as well as gained from merging other Tata airlines into their fold in late 2024 (Vistara with Air India, and AirAsia with Air India Express).
Between March 2022 and March 2025, Air India’s pilot strength grew threefold and that of Air India Express sixfold. Together, as of March 2025, they were only 51 pilots short of IndiGo. On a per-plane basis, they were doing better than IndiGo, though the requirement for wide-bodied planes, which Air India operates more, is greater.
Pilot strength also gains importance in light of new regulations, which necessitate all airlines to have more pilots than they currently have.
Loss to profit
Ultimately, whether more planes or more pilots, all these steps have to align to turn the business around, first at an operational level and then at a net level. Under the Tatas, Air India has scaled up well on the revenue side, be it inorganically (by absorbing other Tata airlines) or organically (by flying more passengers and higher realisations).
But profitability remains elusive. In 2024-25, the two airlines reported a combined net loss of about ₹9,700 crore. Setbacks like the crash don’t help the business, from both a reputational and financial standpoint.
Last week, Bloomberg reported the airline was looking at a net loss of about ₹15,000 crore for 2025-26. Compare this with IndiGo, which reported a similar net profit in 2023-24 and 2024-25.
For airlines, the main cost is fuel, and crude oil prices have been favourable. Air India has capitalised on this window, but not to the extent it initially charted out.
www.howindialives.com is a database and search engine for public data.