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It’s time for me to interrupt my regular publishing schedule, because 29 February is a date that comes once every four years — and that requires a flight that’s just as exceptional and rare. I hereby present to you a mini-report, for the first time on Flight-Report, of Air India’s brand-new A350-900! This new flagship widebody of the Indian flag carrier entered service on 22 January 2024 — on the same day that the Ram Mandir temple was inaugurated in Ayodhya to great fanfare and celebrations, and nearly two years after Air India (Express)’s acquisition by the Tata Group on 27 January 2022.
Two A350-900s, VT-JRA and VT-JRB, are serving some domestic crew-training-and-familiarisation flights from 22 January to 29 February 2024, before being rostered on longhaul flights, and it was obvious that I simply HAD to fly it when I got the chance. The rotations are as follows: AI589 BLR–BOM–MAA–BLR in the morning and afternoon, AI587 BLR–MAA–HYD–BLR in the evening, on all days except Tuesdays; instead, on Tuesdays, AI868/869 BLR–DEL–BLR. That covers a total of four metros in the southern half of the country — Bengaluru (BLR), my home base; Chennai (MAA), my former home; Mumbai (BOM), my destination on this flight; and Hyderabad (HYD) — while the weekly flight to Delhi is for maintenance.
This mini-report will be an ‘initial impressions’ kind of report, much like what Ben Schlappig from One Mile at a Time does, as he publishes his general thoughts and brief pictures of a new product some weeks (in my case, months) before deep-diving into a full review. I think it’s more important and pertinent to publish this mini-report first for readers across the globe to get a feel of the refreshed, revamped Air India experience on the A350 (and, for that matter, Air India’s much-fancied transformation) as it’s barely days since I flew this product. The full, detailed report is expected to be published only around August 2024 — several months from now, and a year after Air India’s mega-rebrand was unveiled the previous August — if I am able to keep to my current two-reports-a-month publishing schedule. I know you guys won’t wait for that many months, so I might as well end the suspense right now — let’s jump right into it!
Note: I typically post the flight details like registration and route upon reaching the point where I enter the aircraft, but for this mini-review I’m putting those details up front here. Also, for the routing here, I’m marking the remaining flight reviews for this trip as ’not available’ — since only this one is getting a mini-review — but rest assured that when the time comes (around August 2024) those flights’ detailed reviews will be up as well.
Flight: Air India AI589/AIC589
Date: Sunday, 25 February 2024
Route: Bengaluru Kempegowda (VOBL/BLR) to Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (VABB/BOM)
Aircraft: VT-JRB, Airbus A350-900
Age: 5 months at the time (built: 11 September 2023, delivered: 2 February 2024)
Seat: 10K (starboard side, window)
Boarding: 6:45am IST (UTC +5:30)
Departure: 7:30am IST
Arrival: 8:55am IST
Duration: 1 hour 25 minutes
Notes:
• Fourth airline’s A350 flown, and tenth A350 overall, after Singapore Airlines (five until then — or six when including the very next flight: SQ421, BOM–SIN, 9V-SHL), Thai Airways (three) and Cathay Pacific Airways (one).
The A350-900 is far and away my most frequent widebody flown, thanks singlehandedly to Singapore Airlines and its 9V-SH* series of medium-haul or regionally configured A350s, of which I’ve flown five so far — to Bangkok, to and from Bengaluru, from Hanoi and now from Mumbai! There was also 9V-SMF, the 10,000th Airbus of all time, to Kuala Lumpur in 2022.
Sunday, 25 February. My family (parents and grandmother) and I had left our home in the southern fringes of Bengaluru at 4:20am, in a cheap Toyota Etios sedan that had been rented for the purpose, and set off for Kempegowda Airport in the far northeast of the city. With luck, and thanks to the fact that this was in the middle of the night, we managed to zip through the 45-km journey in an hour or so. As always here since my flight on the very day BLR’s award-winning T2 opened for international operations in September, I headed to this award-winning terminal instead of the older T1, which is now used only for domestic flights — especially those on IndiGo and Akasa Air.
At 5:45 I headed to the check-in counters, and having completed my check-in and collected by online boarding pass in advance, all I had to do was drop off my heavy luggage. (This time I could escape by placing my small suitcase — stuffed with books weighing nearly 8 kg — in the cabin, but at Mumbai for the Singapore-bound flight, the agents refused to allow such a heavy bag onboard. Instead they forced me to check it in as well, in addition to my two suitcases, and this cost me a hefty ₹10,000 (≈US$120) — sadly, my first excess-baggage charge in ages!)
Fittingly for Bengaluru, the Namaste sign at the start of the queue had a Namaskara written in Kannada — the language of the southern state of Karnataka, of which this is the capital — and below was a picture of the Vidhana Soudha, the state legislative assembly building, which is an imposing piece of architecture as much as T2.
Oh yes: I’d upgraded to premium economy a few hours before the flight, and now I was going to reap its benefits on a widebody. This was not my first PE flight, though; that came in the opposite direction (BOM–BLR) two months before, on a Vistara A320neo — the one-month-old, factory-fresh VT-TQT — on Christmas Eve, several hours after landing at Mumbai on the Singapore Airlines A380. There, though, I’d been upgraded to Premium Economy without my knowledge, and hadn’t paid for it!
Once past security, I headed to the domestic gates of Terminal 2, and this was my first time here — as it would also be at BOM T2’s international section — since my three preceding flights out of BLR T2 were all international, though I did use the domestic arrivals twice: the aforementioned Vistara flight in December 2023, and more recently an Air India Express (ex-AirAsia India) A320 from Delhi — my first time there since 2015 — a few days before this very trip.
I expected nothing less than opulence and luxury here, as you can see from the Carluccio’s and Armani Exchange above, but I was positively taken aback by the presence of a Hard Rock Café here! I never expected this in an Indian airport, much less a domestic terminal — super kudos to BLR T2 for finally making it happen.
(My previous encounter with an airport HRC was at Dubai in June 2022, where there was a Lionel Messi special burger — something that gained prominence by the time I published that report in December 2022, after he helped Argentina lift the FIFA World Cup in Qatar!)
Before boarding I picked up something from Brioche Dorée, a name that the French owners of this website are likely familiar with!
Ah, there she stood! The beautiful tail of VT-JRB, signifying the next chapter of Indian aviation, where Air India is no longer a laughing-stock but the premier international airline of the country — as the erstwhile Jet Airways was, and Vistara has been since that collapsed. In any case, Vistara isn’t about to be merged with Air India all that soon, but rather only when AI reaches a level of stability with its new product and service.
I went down a level to departure gate D5, and passengers were already starting to board, many of whom were not even aware of the exquisite, extravagant experience that lay in store for them.
Business class consisted of a number of luxurious suites with doors, still mostly in Aeroflot’s finishes. And, I must say, this was a proper quantum leap for our flagship airline in the astute hands of the Tatas, who sure as heck know how to restore their crown jewel to new heights — heights which were associated with Air India for much of the 20th century before government mismanagement brought it to its knees in a state of utter disrepair.
The Russian flag carrier managed to take delivery of seven A350-900s (RA-73151–73157) before further deliveries were cancelled due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which crossed the two-year mark a day before this flight. Of the remaining A350s that were originally intended for Aeroflot, four went to Turkish Airlines as TC-LGI–LGL soon enough, in mid-2022 — even though TK was supposed to acquire six of them, but it took only four. (In fact, these planes were painted for many months in a bare-bones Aeroflot-esque livery, with a blue tail and engines and Turkish Airlines titles!)
Six more A350s were destined for Air India, srategically timed after two major events in 2023: its massive order of 470 aircraft in February, and the grand reveal of its new livery and brand in August. Of these, VT-JRH was the first to emerge from the paint shop in October with the new livery, but it was instead VT-JRA that became AI’s first A350 in December, and this plane, VT-JRB, came home in February 2024. The three remaining A350s are to be registered VT-JRE, JRI and JRM — not a very sequential series, this — with the ‘JR’ series standing for J.R.D. Tata, the founding father of Air India and a visionary in his own right.
I settled into 10K, the right-hand window seat in the last row of the three-row Premium Economy mini-cabin. On the bulkhead screens was a nonstop playback of the A350’s tail camera, something that I’ve seen on Thai Airways and Cathay Pacific, but that’s absent on Singapore Airlines. The Aeroflot-esque blue bulkhead walls and orange lighting were in sharp contrast to Air India’s new colour palette, spearheaded by a rich deep red and accentuated by purples and golds.
The screen was crisp, clean and clear, in terms of both its resolution and the welcome graphics to go with it — as clear a sign of the plane’s newness as any — and this IFE has also started to be fitted on the ex-Delta Air Lines 777-200LRs that ply the routes to New York JFK and San Francisco. Six languages were on offer: English, Hindi, French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. In addition to the touchscreen, there was also a wired remote in the seat’s left side panel, while the tray table folded out from the right side.
I do wish, though, that AI hadn’t chosen the commonplace Nunito font as its secondary brand font to complement the custom-made, super-stretched Air India Sans. Look at Saudia, which rebranded nearly two months after Air India: it didn’t make the mistake of choosing a free font, and instead zeroed in on a very spiky and distinctive font, Saudia Sans — based on the existing Bw Gradual — for its brand. That said, AI has stuck to the Air India Sans-and-Nunito combination very consistently indeed, from the IFE to the website to the magazine, and deserves praise for that.
In the seat pocket were a completely revamped inflight magazine, Namaste.AI, and safety card — a far cry from what I’d seen a few days before on the older A320neo, on a late-night flight from Singapore to Delhi (sadly, this six-hour squeeze was my longest flight so far!), where absolutely nothing bar the boarding passes had even the slightest hint of the mega-rebrand. The safety card there was dated, tired and woebegone, and there was no magazine at all — that was reserved only for the first row of economy. The difference was night and day, and the two AI flights couldn’t have been more polar opposites.
These were some of the numerous Bollywood movies on offer, and I must say Air India has well and truly outdone sister carrier Vistara in this regard — mind you, I was already bowled over by the IFE on my flight on its A321neo in March 2023, from Singapore to Mumbai.
Like Vistara’s A321neos and 787-9s — Vistara was the world’s first airline to offer this — AI’s A350s are fitted with Panasonic Aerospace’s proprietary Arc moving-map system, which offers detailed overviews into destinations, routes and views like few others can.
Consider, for instance, this introductory piece on the destination, Mumbai — sadly Bengaluru wasn’t a featured city here — which accurately captures the manic, frantic never-sleeping energy and vibe that attracts me so much to this financial and entertainment capital of the country, in contrast to the stodgy political capital, Delhi, which with its perennial pollution and fog is doing itself no favours. (And no, DEL T3 isn’t a patch on BOM T2, much less BLR T2 — suffice it to say that I was somewhat disappointed by India’s largest and busiest airport.)
Some things, though, still had the old AI logo and branding, such as this breakfast menu — the font here, Concourse, was introduced (only for the menus) as soon as the Tata Group acquired AI in January 2022 — as well as the airsickness bag, which you can barely see here, as I’m not going to show such an ancient thing in more detail.
At seven-ish, flight attendant Melissa (an Indian, despite her Western name) — clad in AI’s new royal-ruby-red saree-inspired uniform — and an unnamed (no name badge) but very handsome man rolled out the pre-departure drinks, followed by cold towels and the above menus. I guess these are perks of Premium Economy that those in cattle class don’t get to enjoy, but at the end of the day — and the end of this day, for that matter, as I descended back home into Changi at 8pm — I’m more than happy at the back of the bus, ideally in a K-seat in Row 66 and above.
Soon thereafter we pulled out of the gate, and who should I see parked in the distance but VT-JRA, the only other A350 in the AI fleet at the time! Both aircraft are based in Bengaluru and spend the night here, and to see the tail of one while sitting next to the winglet of the other — all the more so with those exquisite red, gold and purple patterns — was a sight to behold and remember for life. Extravagant, marvellous, splendid: words fail me here.
For the record, there was a manual safety demonstration, as AI’s new safety video — entitled ‘Safety Mudras’ and featuring eight classical dances from across the length and breadth of the country’ — had been released only two days before, and hadn’t yet been loaded on board to be screened. I found the cabin crew announcements — made by the lead flight attendant, Vandana, who was serving business class and who I didn’t see — to be extremely formal and stilted in tone, in great contrast to the friendly and futuristic post-rebrand image AI has been trying to portray.
A pity indeed, since AI’s video begins and ends with a beautiful young girl seated by the window, holding a jharokha window-like element, eyes aglow in wonder — much like Air India’s first TV commercial with the new brand that was released right during the mega-rebrand in August, where a bunch of children are mesmerised by the transformation unfolding before them.
By way of comparison, Vistara’s safety video (released in mid-2020 during the throes of COVID) is based on yoga and relaxation, and both make for very charming safety videos that adequately introduce the viewer to culture and tradition while being informative, instructional, interesting and very Indian. They aren’t likely to grate on you upon repeat watchings, unlike Qantas’ overlong safety video that was introduced recently.
There was no better time than now, as we coasted down the runway, to switch on the tail camera — a majestic feature of the sexy-elegant A350 (but absent from SQ) — and keep panning between it and the window to capture the best possible takeoff views as VT-JRB soared into the skies.
Another sign of the cutting-edge IFE was the fact that the tail-camera view could be minimised to a pop-up window: entertainment doesn’t get much more modern than this!
At 7:30 we were into the air, and the grand reds and golds of the aircraft made for a vivid contrast with the brown landscapes of the countryside surrounding Bengaluru. This was hands down the most silent takeoff roll I’d ever experienced, without any of the revving and spooling and whooshing that otherwise make takeoff sounds one of my favourite audio experiences.
I’m posting only a small sampling of the entertainment offering here, with the below example being Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, an evergreen classic mid-2000s comedy series revolving around a high-society family in a posh Mumbai high-rise — especially in contrast with Monisha, the hapless daughter-in-law, who is constantly admonished by her snooty mother-in-law Maya Sarabhai (played by the inimitable Ratna Pathak Shah) for her lowbrow, ‘middle-class’ ways.
In a corner of the selection, I found a number of ‘mixes’ of Bollywood music videos starring famous actors. I chose the one dedicated to the King of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, around midway during cruise. Below you see Chaleya, the romantic chartbuster from 2023’s biggest Indian blockbuster, Jawan, which I’ve mentioned in previous reports.
Most of the other SRK songs in this compilation were from the iconic production house Yash Raj Films (YRF), particularly those directed by the company’s iconic founder Yash Chopra — Dil Toh Pagal Hai (1997), Veer-Zaara (2004) and his swansong, Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012), released just after his sudden demise — as well as those from his pioneering yet reticent, almost invisible, son Aditya Chopra: the legendary Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) as well as Mohabbatein (2000) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008).
Much more recently, YRF released Pathaan, SRK’s comeback film after four years and the first mega-blockbuster of 2023, eclipsed only by Jawan, which was distributed but not produced by it. These two are patriotic action thrillers with loads of VFX and CGI, in contrast to the other movies mentioned here, which are simple-hearted romantic dramas with a touch of comedy woven in.
At the same time, Melissa rolled out the breakfast, and I’d chosen the South Indian vegetarian option, since there’s only so many times you can have eggs for breakfast on a plane. This meal was a quintessentially Tamil one: ven pongal, palak (spinach) corn dosa and paniyaram, served with sambar, a thick and tasty yellow liquid — in addition to the standard sides of butter, a croissant, yoghurt and fruits, in this case dragonfruit. Delicious but not that memorable, I guess, since you can’t do all that much experimentation with breakfast.
Along with the meal, I was served a glass of 7-Up garnished with a lemon slice, as you can see placed on the centre console to the left, while my seatmate had a glass of water placed right behind.
There was only so much that I could write about in the limited one-and-half-hour duration, but I did anyway, with big headline fonts and multicoloured highlighters. You can also notice that this was my second time flying two A350s in a day, the first occasion being two A350s on Thai Airways in June 2022 — my first time on the airline and the aircraft — and an hours-long layover in the middle.
At 9 we descended over the legendary slums of Mumbai — as the tail camera made exceedingly clear — and into Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, which enjoys a central location but is severely hamstrung by its inability to expand. BOM is firmly one of my favourite airports on this planet, alongside BLR, between its majestic, luxurious architecture, its wide variety of airlines and its selection-par-excellence of retail outlets that’s so much more affordable than the Vuittons and the Diors of my home airport, Changi.
An AI 747-400 slowly revealed herself as the innumerable IndiGo and Vistara A320/1neos drew up closer, and then we landed much more roughly and suddenly than the silky-smooth takeoff.
This Queen of the Skies was VT-ESO, with Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi on the tail to commemorate his 150th birth anniversary in 2019, a livery also sported by three other AI aircraft: 787-8 VT-ANP, A320neo VT-CIO and the now-retired A319 VT-SCS.
We parked close to two widebodies from SkyTeam, a Virgin Atlantic A350-1000 (G-VLIB) and a Saudia A330-300 (HZ-AQH) — this is another airline which rebranded not long after AI, and whose new yesterday-becomes-tomorrow livery is also confined to very few planes, mostly A321neos — with a 737-800 from the same alliance, Kenya Airways’ 5Y-CYD, also in the vicinity.
I stepped off VT-JRB and thanked Melissa and co. for their generous service, as they were at the forefront of launching AI into the league of the world’s best airlines. And then it was time for me to proceed to the check-in counters for another A350-900, operated by the very airline — one of those award-winning, world-beating ones — that partly owns Vistara and will take a stake in AI after their merger: Singapore Airlines. En route, I caught this magnificent picture of my AI A350, and that is a livery that I hope to see on many more aircraft by the end of 2024, new and otherwise.
(Unfortunately, the passengers around me on SQ421 to Singapore had a decidedly negative experience: one called the seats ’no different from IndiGo’ in terms of their thinness, despite the presence of IFE, blankets and all sorts of frills that are unimaginable on 6E. Moreover, the crew ran out of food choices towards the back, where I was seated, and had to apologise repeatedly to the passengers for the heavily delayed and constrained food service. I wasn’t complaining — this was miles above 6E’s bare-bonesness and refusal to serve almost any food — but it shows that even class-leaders like SQ have their off days as well!)
You know what makes a truly great flight? Either of two things: the crew’s warmth, friendliness and lovely geniality — something that I strongly believe SriLankan Airlines has mastered the art of, doing so much with so few resources and such a small fleet — or, failing which, a cutting-edge, ultramodern aircraft (ideally an A350 like this) with the very best screens, seats and cameras in existence today. This AI A350 flight firmly falls into the latter category as far as the unparallelled hard product is concerned, and finally answers the question of what onboard offering is supposed to supplant Vistara and SriLankan (or ‘UK and UL’) as the two best airlines in the Indian subcontinent.
In every fathomable way, the A350 represents the forefront of innovation in terms of Air India’s fleet, seats, entertainment and service — not to mention the super-sharp livery on tail and winglet alike, with its intricate patterns, and the overall top-to-bottom transformation of the brand, from typography to uniforms to safety videos to the frequent-flyer programme. If there ever was a group that could have so drastically overhauled an infamous money-bleeder with decrepit planes into a sign of prestige, it’s Tata — they know only too well just how much J.R.D. had turned it into an iconic brand in the Jet Age before it tumbled and stumbled in the Government’s hands.
Campbell Wilson, Air India’s Kiwi CEO, has had a most unenviable but unbelievably rewarding task on his hands, and if the signs so far are any indication, it won’t be very long before AI joins the league of SQ (which will own a stake in it), Emirates, Qatar and Etihad in the world’s top luxury airlines. Not to mention Japan’s twin prides: JAL, with its phenomenally spectacular A350-1000 first-class suites, and ANA with its unimaginably generous ‘THE Room’ business class. And then there’s Taiwan, that tiny but most ambitious island, where EVA and Starlux and China Airlines are constantly trying to outdo each other as to who can provide Asia’s finest combination of hard and soft product — and that’s not even taking into account Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific, the original prestige carrier of Northeast Asia, whose Aria Suites are just months away.
But for Air India to reach that level, the biggest change will undoubtedly need to stem from the cabin crew and other staff. This is after all an airline which routinely made the headlines for infamous incidents like ‘pee-gate’ or rats on a plane, but with the dual leadership of Tata and Singapore Airlines — which has served Vistara excellently all these years, just not at a global level — such aberrations will be pushed into the past, and India will be well on the way to having a world-beating airline. Melissa and her team were a glimpse into just what can lie in store in the not-too-distant future, from their exuberant uniforms to the pre-departure drinks and towel service to the actual meal — and the real test will be on those thirteen-hour-plus journeys to the US and beyond, the real test of mettle and grit.
The full review for this flight will be up in August, with more details, pictures and opinions, but for now I can only feel proud to say: Jai Hind!
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Thanks for sharing!
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