Review of Air India flight from Singapore to New Delhi in Economy

Reminder: Vistara will cease to exist on 12 November 2024, and all its operations will take place under the Air India name from that day. Given AI’s so-far subpar track record on its ordinary A320s, 777s and 787s — as this honestly all-around underwhelming flight was grim proof of — it better shape up soon, or else!

Introduction: How much — or little — has Air India changed its A320(neo) experience?

As I’ve been writing about for some weeks now, in February 2024 I made a four-day home trip to Bengaluru entirely on Airbus aircraft, going via Delhi on the outbound and Mumbai on the return. Arguably the two more interesting flights of the lot were the domestic legs: the morning hop from Delhi to BLR — operated by an Air India Express (ex-AirAsia India) A320 — and the brand-new Air India A350, barely a month in service, from BLR to Mumbai. The A350 was definitely the highlight, as it showed just how much the airline has been reinventing itself — as I’ll be posting in detail in the next report, having published a briefer one on 29 February — but the AIX A320 to BLR also excelled with its onboard product and brand. To wrap up the trip was a standard-issue Singapore Airlines A350 Regional from Mumbai, but that wasn’t without incident, given the incessant and prolonged delays in the meal service!

However, this, the first leg of the trip — an Air India A320neo redeye from Singapore to Delhi — was far and away the WORST of the four, and I’ll go as far as saying as this flight was the worst of 2024 overall.* Notwithstanding the fact that this was my first visit to Delhi since 2015 — part of the reason why I booked this itinerary in the first place, since I never visit the north of India otherwise — there was absolutely nothing redeeming about this particular segment except perhaps the cabin crew. In spite of all the transformations undertaken by the Tata Group since taking over Air India in January 2022, there was zero difference from the sarkari (government-owned) Air India of old as far as this flight was concerned. The reasons were manifold:

• This was a extremely no-frills A320neo, with zero entertainment and connectivity, and no inflight magazine either — something that even IndiGo, which is otherwise severely lacking in its onboard product for international flights, provides. (The first row of economy did have the revamped Namaste.AI magazine, though, and I remembered to pinch it from there!)
• This took place in the dead of night, and went on and on for well over five hours — my longest flight at the time (beaten in July by two Emirates A380s between Dubai and Singapore) — and in that insufferably cramped A320neo Recaro seat with negligible legroom. (I’m not usually one to complain about legroom, but this time I had more baggage than usual, since all legs had at least 25 kg of allowance, so…)
• Neither was the food particularly memorable either, contrary to Air India’s well-begotten reputation for providing good Indian cuisine on most sectors. As with the SQ A350 flight from Mumbai later that week, the crew had run out of the non-veg (chicken) option, leaving only the vegetarian, whose quality was good but not quite as good as on SQ.
• Those boarding passes aside, as reflected in the cover image, there was zero indication whatsoever of Air India’s mega-rebranding that was unveiled in August 2023 and implemented starting from December. All safety cards and onboard items exclusively used the old logo.
• Finally, despite being India’s busiest and the world’s 10th-busiest, Indira Gandhi International Airport — in particular its flagship Terminal 3 — was a major letdown in terms of aesthetics and appearance, and it simply cannot hold a candle to the far superior BOM and BLR airports with their brilliant Terminal 2s. (However, in my opinion, as far as major hubs in the region go, Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport remains the ugliest of them all.)

*Not even the two Thai Airways 777-200ER flights to and from Bengaluru in August 2024 — both operated by HS-TJW, which seems to have a peculiar fondness for showing up in my flight log (at the TG A350’s expense, which I’ve never been able to get so far from a late-night flight from India) — were this bad. The whole point of flying Thai Airways to BLR was to get the A350, which operates the sector more that 90% of the time — but every now and then gets swapped to the old -200ER, and that happened yet again, completely defeating the purpose. That does not mean that that old plane was as uncomfortable or had as poor a meal service as this AI A320neo, though; the TG crew did the best they could given the circumstances.

(After all, I’ve long accepted the Thai Airways 777-200ER to be an inescapable part of my travelling history, and the less I castigate that old and dilapidated aircraft the better… seeing as it won’t be retired or refurbished until about 2027 at the earliest. This also meant that I had to book a one-day weekend trip to BKK later in August in order to get the TG A350, which had happily better results!)

Good news is on the way — very soon indeed — for AI’s A320 fleet with new onboard products (but the pitch is awful!)

That said, Air India knows only too well the shortcomings of its A320 fleet, and has started to introduce a new onboard product (including Premium Economy) on some of its newest A320neos. Now this is uncompetitive on a global (or even regional) level, give that there is no seatback IFE — as you’ll find on Vistara’s A321neos (as I flew in March 2023), or the Jet Airways 737s of ages past — but it’s still leaps and bounds above the totally no-frills nature, worse than IndiGo by some metrics, of the existing A320 experience. There is, however, one major problem: the seat pitch is an extremely stingy, knee-crushing 28″ in Economy, and the difference will be all the more apparent on longer A320neo flights like this SIN–DEL sector.

Of the raft of spanking-new A320neos in the VT-RT* series (all in the old livery) that it took delivery of in 2023–4, most will eventually move to Air India Express, as they are all-economy. But two of these (VT-RTW and RTZ) were chosen to feature the new interiors. Moreover, only two brand-new A320neos, VT-RTN and VT-RIO — the latter being the only aircraft, for now at least, in the VT-RI* series — sport the new Air India colours, and they too feature the new cabins.

Given the aggressive nature of AI’s rollout of this product, with all A320s (perhaps even the remaining legacy A319s and A321s) set to feature these cabins by 2025, one can only hope that the misery I experienced on this flight won’t last all that long… but that seat pitch is A BIG RED FLAG. As for the A321s — four A321neos (VT-RTB–RTE) were delivered in early 2023 and the others are older ones (built 2007–2010) in the VT-PP* series — it remains to be seen if AI incorporates the advances seen in Vistara’s set of ten A321neos (VT-TVA–TVJ) like lie-flat seats and seatback IFE in its forthcoming deliveries over the late 2020s. I just hope the pitch isn’t as terrible as the A320s, and that the A321s do most of the four-hour-plus (like SIN/KUL) flying!

<Disclaimer: This section is heavy on screenshots from Flightradar24 and elsewhere>

Tuesday, 20 February, afternoon. If there’s one thing Air India did well with its rebrand, it’s the implementation of its new custom font across its website. While I’m no fan of using Google Fonts anywhere*, at least the Nunito used here is not the sickening Montserrat that Air India’s interim website (until December 2023) used, and that Air India Express continues to overuse in its own branding.

As you can see, both flights (SIN–DEL and DEL–BLR) were part of the same itinerary, with the latter shown here as AI9751 but actually operating as I5740 — in fact using the erstwhile AirAsia India’s I5 code, which will be retired from 1 October 2024 and replaced entirely by Air India Express’ IX code. I found it funny that AI383’s duration was shown as 5h48m, with the arrival time being 2:18am, which I thought was unnaturally precise. Anyway, I entered my KrisFlyer details — the programme to which I credit all my Star Alliance flights — selected my seat and completed the check-in process smoothly.

*Once again I am forced to draw a comparison with Saudia, whose own rebrand some weeks later flawlessly and superbly uses a single-font aesthetic with NO FREE FONTS. Why couldn’t Air India follow this, or other perfect single-font websites like Etihad, Air France or (to take a Star Alliance member) Aegean — the last of which literally makes me cry tears of joy?

The next step was to get the boarding passes, and they were very nicely displayed too, something I’d never expect the old Air India to do. But there was invariably an error when trying to get them emailed, and so I had to use a third-party website as you’ll see below.

So far so good, but, as I’ve explained above, none of these on-ground advances in the Air India brand translated into an improved onboard experience!

As always my parents wished me great luck and a safe trip back home, and in due course I received my boarding passes as well from a third-party website. Oddly enough, the Air India Express flight, because of its I5 (instead of IX) code, showed the operating airline as ‘Societe [sic] Nouvelle Air Mali’! 😂

3pm. Later in the day I tracked the aircraft at Delhi in order to judge which A320neo would be operating my flight. To my amazement, I discovered that an A321neo (SX-NAD) of the same Aegean Airlines that I mentioned above had landed at DEL! This had arrived from Dubai, which is ordinarily the Greek flag carrier’s easternmost destination, and was probably some sort of one-off charter or maintenance flight.

In the coming years, A3 might not be such an oddity at DEL but a regular presence, if its April 2024 announcement of ordering — just four for now — A321neos (LRs?) in a dedicated premium-configured subfleet comes to fruition. Admittedly Greece isn’t much of an attraction for (South) Asian travellers, but Delhi and Mumbai did feature in A3’s press release as among the destinations that it might target. While a long shot, it would be lovely to see A3 in this part of the globe, given that fellow Star Alliance member LOT Polish Airlines has been doing quite well in Delhi and Mumbai (but it has never returned to alliance hubs Singapore or Bangkok). Given how all-around lovely an airline A3 is, with its honest above-ordinary Greek service and spectacular branding and typography, that would be divine!

As far as my flight was concerned, the A320neo operating AI383 from Singapore erroneously showed up as VT-EXO, which wears the Star Alliance livery. But in a few moments the actual A320neo for my flight, VT-CIP, showed up on the radar, as it prepared for departure. Also among the planes on the ground was the three-month-old VT-TQT, which I’d flown two months before in my first-ever Premium Economy flight — and my third (and last) time on Vistara!

In the broader northern Indian airspace was an exquisite-looking (and ancient) 757 of Kazakh holiday carrier Sunday Airlines, and the leisure subsidiary of SCAT Airlines — technically the country’s biggest airline by fleet, with a few more than flag carrier Air Astana.

Over in Singapore, a rare military aircraft made an appearance: PT-ZNG, an Embraer KC-390, which had arrived from Delhi some days before — half a world away from its Brazilian home. Yes, this has no bearing on the actual report, but I can’t help writing about such interesting coincidences if I can spot them on Flightradar24…

Anyway, coming back to Air India, I chanced upon an extremely recent (published the previous day) article by Runway Girl Network on how its ex-Delta 777-200LRs were slowly but steadily renewing their IFE offerings, with a brand-new look and feel — replete with the Arc moving-map solution by Panasonic, pioneered by Vistara and also (as I experienced in a few days’ time) found on AI’s new A350!

Some more of these Runway Girl Network articles on AI’s PaxEx transformation are in the Tourism Bonus section at the end.

As the sun sets, birthday queen Rihanna takes over the night

5pm. As the sun slowly started its path to dip below the horizon, I picked up a limited-time sakura-flavoured cream puff from Beard Papa’s, a Japanese cream-puff store that’s a favourite of mine.

These are the typical evening views of the roads at Novena, where I work: a dense commercial and medical district lying to the north of Singapore’s business centre, which overlooks the famed Marina Bay Sands.

Later in the evening, around 7, I finally bid farewell to my coworkers and hopped into a Toyota C-HR mini-crossover — a favourite of mine for its styling — that was the first of two Grab pickup cars. I sped through the Singapore streets, with the setting sun lending a light luminance to the surroundings.

It was 20 February, and Barbados’ most famous musician (nay, person) was turning 36, so the local 987FM station was playing some of @badgalriri’s earlier hits, among them Rude Boy.

Among the interesting observations en route was an ad for Citibank Singapore’s PremierMiles card on a taxi, with a model plane fixed atop the vehicle. This and other such miles-earning cards — most recently DBS’ Altitude card — have well and truly opened my eyes to the world of miles-and-points travel, something I was unaware of for ages!

At length I reached home on the east coast, and freshened up for a bit, while my dad (as always) posted the scheduled departure information of my upcoming flights. Before long I was into a second Grab car, a regular Mazda3 sedan this time, for the hardly 15-minute ride to Changi Airport.

With Rihanna’s Diamonds blasting into my ears, I whooshed past the Siglap MRT station next door to home — which opened its doors in June 2024 after an agonising months-long wait — and onwards to Changi. I was pleasantly surprised at the sight of a Singapore Airlines A350 taxiing directly overhead: a sight that’s not all that commonly seen at most places!

At length I reached Terminal 2, the most newly reopened terminal at the world’s best airport — when it isn’t toppled by Doha Hamad — and pulled up to the departure doors. I was most astonished at finding British charter airline TUI Airways among the airline logos suspended overhead, as it’s extremely rare for such European holiday airlines to fly to Southeast Asia, outside of perhaps Bangkok.

(BKK is seasonally served by Norse Atlantic Airways, and previously Norwegian Air Shuttle prepandemic — but those are scheduled LCCs and not holiday airlines in the TUI or, seasonally, the Air Transat mould.)

Apparently TUI had launched a seasonal once-weekly charter (BY426/427) from Birmingham (BHX) in December 2023, targeting cruise customers on the Marella Discovery 2 ship — thereby temporarily making it the third UK city with a flight to Singapore, after London (LHR and LGW) and Manchester (MAN)! Soon enough TUI launched service from London Gatwick (BY58/59) and Manchester (BY164/165) to Singapore as well, with all three routes lasting until the beginning of April.

Always trust Terminal 2 to blow you away — at SIN, BOM and BLR (but not DEL)

I headed to the Air India check-in desks in the gleaming Terminal 2 facility, and there wasn’t the option of a kiosk check-in as for SQ; it was the old-fashioned manual way tonight. While the standing sign (third row of pictures below, right) had the old AI logo, several other applications managed to feature the new Air India logo in all its glory.

In a matter of minutes I was issued both boarding passes — this SIN–DEL sector (AI383) and the subsequent DEL–BLR flight on Air India Express (marketed as AI9751, actually I5740) — though later the staff at DEL T3 also issued an AIX-branded version of the latter. This was to be the only part of the flight with the new Air India branding, sadly!

Amusingly to me, but distressingly to the passenger involved, someone had turned up too late for their flight to Chennai (SQ528) and was pleading in vain to the check-in agent, who kindly but firmly told them to no-show and head back as there was nothing that could be done!

As I captioned, ‘Immigration counters completely deserted!!!’ — a far cry from what often happens at Indian airports, with a mad rush for the immigration queues. For that matter, all Indian airports require you to show your documents to airport security (or scan via DigiYatra, as the case may be) before entering the terminal, whereas all non-Indian airports I’ve seen allow you to simply waltz inside.

Terminal 2 — and I love the low-ceilinged aspect of Terminals 1 and 2 compared to the high-ceilinged T3 — had the typical selection of retail outlets (not Louis Vuitton, though) along with that mystical, near-iridescent watercoloured carpeting that’s a world away from what I’ve seen elsewhere.

It was half-past nine, well in time for the flight, and I headed upstairs to the Straits Food Village, where I’d never been before: just a glorified SG hawker centre by another name! Among the names that stood out were Kaveri Indian Vegetarian and the Vietnamese restaurant Pho Street, which is where I ended up eating.

I went for the Roasted Lemongrass Chicken with Fragrant Rice (S$12.90; around US$10) along with a lemongrass juice (S$3.50) which I love to have, more than any other drink, at Thai and Vietnamese food joints. All-in-all, a satisfying meal, even though a moderately expensive one — though well in line with Singapore’s pricey standards: at least there wasn’t any GST or service charge!

Some more views of the assortment of F&B options above the terminal, all of them overpriced (often upwards of S$15) — and that’s by Singapore standards, since this is far and away the most expensive country in the region — with the Hard Rock Café beating them all in terms of both experience and pricing.

I shared the new boarding pass design (‘Apurbo dekhte!’ — it looks splendid!) and, later, the Vietnamese khabar (Bengali for food) with my parents. Now with the Aegean A321neo (SX-NAD) at Delhi having caught my fancy, I went further and searched for a number of Star Alliance-liveried A320s on Flightradar24 — starting with A3’s specimen, the 2008-built SX-DVQ.

Man, I love Aegean so bad… I really want Greece to be the first country I visit in ‘proper’ Europe, and to fly there on A3, never mind the fact that it nowadays takes months and months (at best) for Indians to get hold of a Schengen visa!

All the more so since AI’s Star Alliance-liveried A320neo, VT-EXO, was mistakenly shown as going to operate my flight — even though this was now en route from Mumbai to Jeddah, and VT-CIP had just landed at Changi!

I kept on browsing through all the A320s I could recollect in this livery, from Avianca’s N195AV and N477AV, to Shenzhen’s B-6296/6297, to Croatia’s 9A-CTO — incidentally the only white-tailed aircraft in this livery outside Singapore Airlines today. (Of these, the only A320neos are VT-EXO and TAP Air Portugal’s CS-TVF.)

This done, I proceeded downstairs and past the koi pond, which had a fair share of travellers congregating on the glass walkway above. I tell you, T2 has so far been my favourite terminal at Changi, but when I flew Cathay Pacific out of T4 (at a similar late-night time) in August 2024, I was bowled over at just how magnificent T4 matched up. Never mind the fact that T3 is the one with the butterfly garden, and hence garners most of the planet’s praise.

In contrast, T1 — what I nickname ‘Terminal One(world)’, though several Star carriers like Thai and Turkish use it — hasn’t quite been a favourite of mine, though even that is miles and miles above the grey ugliness of Bangkok Suvarnabhumi.

At length, after walking a fair bit through the F-gate corridors, I found myself at Gate F52 where the at-gate security check was taking place.

As you might expect, this was by no means an impressive aircraft: a humble A320neo wearing a livery best associated with state-owned corruption, mismanagement and disorder. But my next late-night departure out of T1 in July was the majestic Emirates A380, breaking this flight’s record for my longest so far — only to be beaten in the return direction (DXB–SIN) two days later!

With the seating area and its purple-and-pink, à la Thai Airways, seats being largely vacated — and the TVs having a strangely blue tint — I made my way down to the jetbridge. My little A320neo was flanked on either side by fellow Star Alliance widebodies: a United 787-9 (N24972 as UA29 from San Francisco) on one side and an SQ 777-300ER on the other.

Believe me when I tell you that there was nothing, absolutely NOTHING, by way of the slightest hint of Air India’s mega-rebranding on this flight, other than the boarding passes. If reports like this one from September 2024 — a US$6,300 first-class flight being absolutely the filthiest in recent memory — AI has a very, very, VERY long way to go before it can meet the standards set by Vistara (which it’s going to kill on 12 November 2024), as well as the erstwhile Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines and other fallen giants of Indian skies!

The flight: Boarding and departure

Flight: Air India AI383/AIC383
Date: Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Route: Singapore Changi (WSSS/SIN) to Delhi–Indira Gandhi (VIDP/DEL)
Aircraft: VT-CIP, Airbus A320neo
Age: 5 years 7 months at the time (built: 10 July 2018, delivered: 23 July 2018)
Seat: 25F (starboard side, window)
Boarding: 10:30pm SGT, UTC +8 (8:00pm IST, UTC +5:30)
Departure: 11:13pm SGT (8:43pm IST)
Arrival: 2:13am IST (4:43am SGT)
Duration: 5 hours 30 minutes

Notes:
• First visit to Delhi in 9 years, the last being in May 2015*, and first-ever visit to Terminal 3 at DEL. Also the first redeye flight westbound from Singapore to India instead of the other way round — and I pray this is the last!(Even though that meant I had the rare opportunity of going back and forth (changing my phone time) between the previous day and the next…)

• Longest flight ever taken at the time, though this was beaten by two Emirates A380s in July 2024 between Singapore and Dubai. A6-EOF on the westbound EK353 on 20 July breached the 6.5-hour mark. Two days later, on the eastbound EK354, A6-EUM — a special A380 due to its unique configuration, which predominantly flies EK354/355 DXB–SIN–DXB — set a new 7.5-hour record.

• First time flying the Air India A320neo since 2019, a year during which I flew exclusively IndiGo and Air India A320(neo)s. The last such was VT-EXL on AI347, the morning flight from Singapore to Chennai, on 4 December of that year. Again, an aircraft I have no wish to repeat — certainly not until AI refurbishes its A320 fleet, and even then the legroom will be even more terrible…
(In stark contrast, an old little A319 in March 2023 — VT-SCR on AI573 (BOM–MAA) — was a delight in every way, from the caring crew to the scrumptious food!)

*That was en route to Kashmir, specifically Srinagar (SXR), the capital and gateway to the mountainous tourist destination — which was also the final time I flew SpiceJet, the doddering, almost-dead 737-operating Indian low-cost carrier which was struggling back then and continues to gasp for breath a decade later. (And also happens to share its IATA code, SG, with the country code for Singapore, the class-leading city-state that I’ve made my home, which could not be more opposite — in terms of success and fortune — to SpiceJet.)

Red chilli and yellow mustard: AI’s legacy A320 seating

It’s notoriously hard to spot the Star Alliance logo on the fuselage while boarding — in contrast to Oneworld (and, more often than not, SkyTeam) where the alliance logo is placed to the right of the door and therefore is most visible — and even then it’s only possible on narrowbodies like this A320, and not on widebodies.

Still, I angled my iPhone in the right way and managed to grab the elusive five-point star, what I consider to be the benchmark of excellence in the aviation world — despite the presence of sh*tty airlines like Air China and Egyptair — even though the group with the atrocious blue circle has better members overall, above all the eCXeptional Cathay Pacific, when it comes to branding and typography. (Branding-wise, JAL, despite its superbness in other areas, will always stick out like a sore thumb. I digress.)

Inside the plane — was there even a flight attendant to say Namaste? — was a far more straightforward way to take a picture of the elegant silver star: below the old Air India logo on perhaps the only customer-facing screen installed on this A320neo! People continued to fill their heavy bags into the overhead bins like there was no tomorrow, before settling their bottoms on the classic yellow and red seats, with small paisley patterns, that the government-era Air India is distinguished by.

I settled into 25F, which was the best window seat that I could get on this narrowbody; on A320s I generally tend to choose 22F — which was also the case on the next flight. The seatbacks had tourism ads for the eastern state of Odisha, one of the more underrated ones out there. And, my word, the seat was as cramped as could be — something the latest A320 cabin product has worsened by miles. (And no, there was not the slightest sign of the revamped Namaste.AI magazine either: that was reserved for the very first row of economy.)

I will say this in favour of the boarding process, though: there was smooth, soothing instrumental music playing on the PA system. While not spellbinding like Garuda Indonesia’s traditional music — as I experienced in June 2023 — it was still among the better ones out there.

The safety card was as dreary and woebegone as they come, and was a sign of the sarkari (government-owned) Air India at its worst. (Air India’s new safety cards, on the A320 and (as I flew) the A350, are leaps and bounds ahead of this ancient, stodgy thing with black outlines.)

Shortly enough, Captain Nikita Shrivastav gave a very short and perfunctory welcome address in Hindi and English, wherein she breathlessly ran through the flight details. Hers is a somewhat common occurrence on Indian flights, given that India’s proportion of female pilots is among the highest (~12%) out there. For that matter, the first officer was a woman as well!

She was followed by Cabin Executive (that’s the term she used) Neha, who delivered a very polished, measured welcome, also in Hindi and English, that began with ‘Dear guests’ — as it did on the cute little A319 from Mumbai in March 2023. She read as follows; this was as well-rehearsed and -enunciated as it gets on an Indian carrier (emphases mine):

‘Dear guests, we are pleased to welcome you on board Air India; a special welcome to all our Flying Returns and Star Alliance members. Our flight AI383 is from Singapore to Delhi and the flying time is expected to be 5 hours and 45 minutes. Captain Nikita Shrivastav is in command today and assisting her in the flight deck today is First Officer Alisha Biplani. My name is Neha and I am your cabin executive. On today’s flight our crews speak English, Hindi, Punjabi and Nepali. Air India a part of Star Alliance brings to you unmatched rewards with its loyalty programme Flying Returns. To enrol and explore the benefits visit airindia.com. We hope you enjoy our warm Indian hospitality and have a comfortable flight. Thank you.’

Neha then delivered a reminder on smoking, smoke detectors, devices in flight mode and suchlike. It felt nice to hear the list of Indian languages spoken by this flight’s cabin crew — as is also the standard at IndiGo — and it sure was better to hear more exotic things than only English and Hindi!

The expected flying time, 5h45m, would easily be the very longest I’d ever been on: longer by far than my SIN–BOM flights on the Vistara A321neo (March 2023) and Singapore Airlines A380 (December 2023), or for that matter the Cathay Pacific A350 from Bengaluru to Hong Kong (also December 2023) — all of which were wrapped up in a bit over/under 5 hours. Certainly, this congested A320neo was not by any means a nice aircraft to set that record — but fortunately I’d have better experiences in July, on two Emirates A380s: 6.5h on SIN–DXB, 7.5h on the return!

Out of the window, United’s 787-9, N24972, from SFO lay parked, and as the manual safety demonstration was completed, we pulled out of the stand by 11.

Meanwhile (as above) a Jeju Air 737-800, HL8316, landed as 7C4055 from Busan. This is one of three independent South Korean low-cost carriers which operate a predominantly 737 fleet, alongside T’way Air, which also has three A330-300s (a bit like VietJetAir), and Eastar Jet, which had a sharp COVID-induced downturn but has steadily recovered — far, FAR better than SpiceJet!

As we started taxiing, a long line of SQ aircraft entered my field of view, among them this A350 (9V-SHA) that had arrived as SQ921 from Manila, and the above 737 MAX 8 (9V-MBG) as SQ735 from Phuket — a destination that, alongside Penang, continues to suffer from the inferior 737-800 service. (But Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, fares worst of all: not only is it nearly 5 hours from Singapore, but there is no respite at all from the 737-800 as there is for Phuket and Penang with their mixed 737-800/737 MAX schedules.)

As far as flights to East Asia in the AI3xx series were concerned, ours was far from the only one in the air: there were flights from Delhi to Sydney and Melbourne, as well as from Bangkok, in addition to Singapore to Mumbai.

Among the most interesting arrivees at this hour was F-WMIL, the first A350-1000 ever built, which had been conducting test flights from Singapore for the past several days. On my part, I shared the flight details with my parents as they wished me a safe trip — far from the only roundabout journey to India I’ve made in the past two years alone!

Before long we had zipped past a large number of parked SQ aircraft, including what looked like a cargo 747 from afar, in addition to ‘Star Alliance Connecting Partner’ — that concept is a disaster — Juneyao Air’s 787-9 (B-209R) in the ‘Genshin’ livery that had arrived from Shanghai (PVG) as HO1605.

And then the small, bright dots of light of Changi grew ever smaller as the humble, knee-crushing A320neo leapt into the blackness above, with (fittingly enough) birthday girl Rihanna’s Diamonds playing on my secondary Android phone.

Once we crossed the Woodlands checkpoint at the north of Singapore Island — at the overwater border with Johor Bahru, Malaysia’s southernmost city — I wrote (from the song): Shine bright, tonight, you and I / We’re beautiful, like diamonds in the sky.

Catering and service: Perhaps the only good thing about this flight

Immediately after takeoff, my seatmate gave the only blanket for our triplet of seats to his wife: too bad, since I could well have done with one. Oh well! It would be a long time before the midnight meal service made its way to my seat.

The moments of solitude allowed me to reminisce of my previous takeoff from Changi, two months before (December 2023), under entirely different circumstances: the glorious Singapore Airlines A380, bound for Mumbai with the setting sun glinting on the wings, instead of this tight A320neo in the dead of night. That allowed me to be nostalgic and wistful, reflecting on the tremendous, momentous year gone by, while this one had no such luxuries!

It would be ages before the cabin crew started rolling out their meal carts, and ages sounded long enough to me to work on my messy, colourful (like the streets of Chandni Chowk) journal entry for the flight. ‘The Evolution of Air India: Part 1’ was an outright failure in most of the aspects that mattered — except, gratefully, for the crew!

Now it was past midnight in Singapore, though not in India, and it was well over an hour after takeoff (12:30am SGT) that the meal carts started being rolled around. Sunakshi, a pretty young woman in a red tunic, and Gill, a turbaned Punjabi sardarji — the only male FA on this side of the curtains — were the ones serving the passengers up front, and they did it speedily. I, on the other hand, had to patiently wait and doodle my journal entry for half an hour more as the aromas of Indian food wafted around the cabin.

There were two other female flight attendants in addition to Sunakshi: one was named Pranita, and the other didn’t have a name badge. The badgeless girl, in a blue tunic, was the one who came to my seat with the bad news: ‘I’m so sorry, sir, I’ve run out of the non-veg option; only the veg one is left.’ Little did I know that the same thing would happen on SQ421 from Mumbai later that Sunday — and that the passengers would take to it much less kindly!

Anyway, the vegetarian meal itself was a more-or-less standard, decent Indian affair, and that’s one of the very few things where the sarkari AI could actually be counted upon. It consisted of paneer butter masala, one of the quintessential Indian vegetarian dishes, along with yellow biryani rice and bhindi masala (okra curry), with the dessert being a sweet phirni (pudding) and the sides being a rock-hard bread roll and a sealed cup (as against a bottle) of water. Instead of my default Sprite, I had Pepsi to go with it. All-in-all the meal quality was good enough, and certainly better than some of the catering missteps that I’ve experienced on Vistara, but not as memorable as what SQ served on both the A380 to Mumbai in December 2023 (top-class chicken curry) and — with the same run-out-of-chicken constraint as this one — the A350 from Mumbai a few days after this flight.

On this A320neo, remarkably devoid of any advances (magazine included) done by the Tata Group, the presentation was exactly the same as in the sarkari days, with everything from the cup of Pepsi to the paper on the tray featuring the old logo. I will, however, note one interesting point: there was plenty of alcohol going around, between Smirnoff, Ballantine’s and Teacher’s, and many people — men especially — were doing as much as they could to get high, metaphorically, when they were already high literally!

Afterwards, however, there was a brief unintentional run-in with Sunakshi, where it turns out that her face had been accidentally captured in a few of my cabin pictures. I explained that this was never my intention, and, at her request, deleted the pictures — clarifying that my objective was only to capture the cabin, and not the cew (certainly not without their permission!). To her credit, Sunakshi never once lost her composure and remained polite throughout.

This done, I switched to Indian time, where it wasn’t midnight yet: my first instance of switching back to the previous day on a flight, something that only an overnight westbound flight of this nature — of which this is one of the rare examples from Singapore to India — can make possible. But I’m by no means willing to fly on a plane as uncomfortable as this just to be able to go back and forth in time!

Caption 1: ‘Cabin lights dimmed now, 2h30m after departure; 3h20m before landing — easily the longest flight taken so far! (Westbound is the difference.)’
Caption 2: ‘For the first time ever, a westbound flight to India over midnight! Yesterday, tomorrow, yesterday, tomorrow again. The date changes no fewer than thrice!!!
The power of six-hour westbound redeyes is clear!’

Two hours disappear from time, and then a sudden descent at Delhi

What else was there to do on a sardine-packed A320neo — without entertainment (or even a magazine) of any kind — but sleep? Come what may, there are few experiences in flight as special and surreal as being able to close your eyes and feel the whoosh of a plane rocketing through the inky-black sky. So this was all there was left to do for the next two hours as we entered the Indian mainland, until, all of a sudden, the cabin lights were brightened slightly as the cabin crew announed their descent.

(There were two additional announcements: one for domestic transit passengers to clear immigration, and the other to share feedback via an email link after the flight — though there was no mention of the Indian government’s AirSewa feedback portal, which is often mentioned on IndiGo flights.)

Having not flown to Delhi in nine years — certainly never at night — the sight of the night-time glow surrounding India’s capital region was wholly unfamiliar to me, and at the same time mildly exciting.

At around 2:10 IST we were on short final, and before long the megamalls of Delhi–NCR (National Capital Region) came into view, and with them the expressways and their lights.

It was 2:13 — 5 hours and 30 minutes after departure — when VT-CIP with its sharp red sharklet touched down at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. ‘Cabin Executive’ Neha, once again, added a little flair into the landing announcement, in a flight that was desperately lacking in it:

‘Dear guests, Air India is pleased to announce 35 minutes early [sic] arrival in Delhi. Welcome to Indira Gandhi International Airport, where the local time is 2:15 a.m. and the outside temperature is 18°C. … [remain seated, overhead bins, mobile devices] … Thank you for choosing to fly with us. In India, we never say goodbye, but always ‘see you again’, and we hope to do so soon. Namaste.‘

Well, I for one have no intention to see this particular type of plane again, at least not from the inside! (There was not a single mention of the Star Alliance, and there were no codeshare partners on this flight for that matter.)

Throughout the taxi to the gate, the same lilting soft instrumental music as at boarding was played over the PA system, while we passed by a company 777-300ER (VT-ALP), a British Airways 787-8 (G-ZBJB) and the real star of the show: an ITA Airways A330-900neo (EI-HJP) as AZ770 from Rome. DEL is at present the Italian carrier’s only Indian destination, but it has plans to launch Mumbai, which will prove to be handy once it gets acquired by the Lufthansa Group and moves from SkyTeam to the Star Alliance in 2025.

My gosh, that is one elegant blue livery — no fewer than four other SkyTeam airlines have blue liveries: KLM and Vietnam Airlines (which I’ve flown) plus Korean Air and Aerolíneas Argentinas! However, ITA is completely blue, including on the belly, while the others have white bellies instead.

On the other side was ET-ATK, the second-youngest of Ethiopian’s 787-8s (of which it has 19) that had arrived as ET688 from Addis Ababa. Flying Africa’s biggest airline from and to Kuala Lumpur in the summer of 2023 had been a treat — with the exotic Selamta magazine to boot!

(Speaking of which, let me also add that Ethiopian is set to take delivery of ET-BAW, the first of four A350-1000s, in October 2024 — thereby becoming the first A350-1000 operator in not only Africa but also the Star Alliance!)

Dead-of-night is always the best time for international arrivals at Indian airports, with not only ITA and Ethiopian but also KLM and British Airways having arrived after midnight, in addition to Emirates and Qatar. (DEL is one of only two Indian airports to have a daytime arrival on Qatar Airways, along with Kochi (COK) in the south. Every other Indian destination has only a single daily arrival on QR, almost always between 2 and 4 at night, thanks to the severely constrained India–Qatar bilaterals.)

Plastic bottle in hand, I stretched my aching legs and stepped off what had been my longest flight ever, and my least comfortable in ages. At least the food was decent, and the crew above par with their traditional Indian hospitality, but this was nothing like the excellent — even for an LCC — Air India Express A320 that awaited me next to take me to BLR.

Once again I managed to capture the alliance logo while disembarking from VT-CIP, as Star Alliance partner Ethiopian’s 787-8 ET-ATK prepared to return to ADD as ET687.

On the one hand I was elated to come to Delhi after nine years — though the dreary grey terminal tempered a lot of that excitement — but on the other hand this flight had shown zero effect of Air India’s acquisition by the Tata Group and the transformations thereafter. This had been no different from my A320neo flights on the sarkari Air India between Chennai and Singapore back in 2018–19, and was much longer and at a wretched hour of night as well.

My caption — with the registration, for once, above the wing (something that I almost never see otherwise) — said it all. I’d even written, in Hindi, ‘Aisi harkat toh IndiGo bhi nahi karega…’ (Not even IndiGo will stoop so low and do this sort of mischief…) though, of course, this comes at the expense of hot food on this cramped aircraft.

As ET-ATK brushed past and headed for departure, I had a few more shots of the exterior through the jetbridge glass: the all-female cockpit crew and a couple of interesting neighbours, namely the EK 777-300ER (A6-EPS) and the splendid ITA Airways A330-900neo.

South Asia’s best airport, amirite? Or so the advertisements proclaim…

Much like at Mumbai, DEL’s arrivals corridors are lined with TotalEnergies ads on all sides. At least the corridors are not as long and winding as they are at BOM, but they’re much more bland and colourless (unlike BOM’s art-infused, culture-rich travellators and walls) — a theme that would continue throughout the rest of the airport.

At one point was placed a sign that read: ‘First visit to India: Avoid the queues and smoothen your entry to India by providing your biometrics here.’
Thereafter came a set of travellators, interspersed with the odd ad here and there.

There was a modicum of Indian culture and art on the walls: not as much as BOM or BLR, but just a little. What DEL emphasised much more, and prominently, was the fact that it’d apparently won the award of South Asia’s Best Airport for 5 consecutive years from the Airport Service Quality (ASQ) programme of the Airports Council International.

Not something I have any inclination to agree with: based on this one experience, I wouldn’t mind at all if (hypothetically) it took another nine years for me to return to an airport as bland and boring as DEL… though the new Noida International Airport (DXN) is opening in 2025, and I bet that one’s going to be as phenomenal as BOM and BLR if not more.

A little less boring, perhaps, was the mosaic wall near the entry to Immigration, which flashed in different colours. And then, on the escalator down, came the most visible sign of DEL T3: the metallic hand sculptures depicting various mudras of Indian culture, beside which an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra towered above the immigration counters.

The immigration process was speedy, even at this busy hour of night, and immediately after that lay the Delhi Duty Free — but not before another ad proclaiming DEL as the Gateway to India. GMR Group (the airport’s operator) was doing all it could to milk the position and standing of this monumentally UNimpressive place.

Then I proceeded to the belt where my baggage from AI383 would arrive, and it was heavier than usual this time, given that all of my travel was on Indian or Singapore(an) airlines and hence I could make use of the more generous baggage allowances.

As always at India, there were a large number of billboard ads — from engineering (Kirloskar) to tourism (the state of Bihar) to jewellery (Kalyan Jewellers) — though the presence of Indian celebrities was much more muted than at Mumbai, where Bollywood stars leap at you from every JCDecaux screen in existence. (Which is of course justified given that it’s the entertainment capital of India.)

This political capital, on the other hand, was much more obsessed with calling itself South Asia’s best airport… a title that I by no means feels justified for DEL. Anyway, the most arduous leg of this trip was done, and better things lay in store on Air India Express — as I’ve already talked about in detail!