Air India CEO on the Carrier's 180-Degree Transformation

29.03.2024 - 02:09 / skift.com / Campbell Wilson / Air India / Meghna Maharishi

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson is undertaking a massive project: completely overhauling India’s newly privatized 92-year-old flag carrier after decades of underinvestment by the Indian government. The average age of an Air India employee was 54 years old. The airline had such a dated email system that its employees started using Gmail.

But that’s the old Air India, according to Wilson. Wilson, who previously worked for the widely-renowned Singapore Airlines, thinks he can bring the same level of service and reputation to Air India — but it’ll take time. Air India’s transformation is built on a five-year plan known as “Vihaan.AI.” And 18 months into it, Air India has already placed a historic order for 470 aircraft and hired 5,000 new employees, lowering the average employee age from 54 to 35.

Here are the highlights from Wilson’s interview at the Skift India Summit 2024. Quotes have been lightly edited and shortened for clarity. Watch the full interview below.

Wilson: The intention and the ambition always was to restore Air India to being a top tier world-class airline. This whole transformation took off probably about 18 months ago when we launched our “Vihaan” program, which is a five-year transformation. The first six months was really triage, trying to address all of the accumulated sins of the past and clean up so we could at least look forward. Then the subsequent year, which is just about to finish, has been about putting a lot of the foundations, whether it be systems, people, processes, premises, equipment in place to really enable us now to take that bold leap forward and bring Air India to where we want it to be.

Wilson: I think we’ve been very clear that Vistara in the long term will become Air India. The Air India brand is 92 years old. It is recognized around the world. It has a very strong — if recently tarnished —heritage. But Air India is the nation’s brand, and so I think it would be foolish for us not to play on that strength.

Now, Vistara has a very, very strong reputation and very strong awareness in India, but not so much globally. So yes, we want to maintain elements of Vistara in the future of Air India. They will certainly be there in people and process. They’re there in some respect in our new brand attributes. A lot of the things that we are doing are modeled on what Vistara does, but we will eventually be collapsing the two. As I say, we won’t be rushing it, probably sometime later this year, sometime next year.

Wilson: I’ve described it as a start-up because really had decades of under-investment. I think I’d spoken previously that the email system in the company was so dysfunctional that people use Gmail. We were the last airline in the world on a particular passenger