Review of Air India flight from Kolkata to Mumbai in Economy

Background

It seems like all my recent flight were very last minute. This trip was mostly for avoiding the West Bengal floods and was booked just over 30 hours before departure, with no booking or even a general idea for the return flight.
This flight was booked for around ₹4,800/$58 on the Air India website, an extremely reasonable price especially for such a last minute ticket. Originally it was meant to be Vistara on the 23rd morning but that suddenly went way up in price, then the next plan was Air India nonstop or Air India Express via Bhubaneswar, both the same morning, but those also shot up, so it was this or a later Air India flight.
Akasa Air also flies on the route but at terrible times and IndiGo I will always avoid. Neither of them were significantly cheaper and overall this AI flight was the best.
My post-COVID flight stats make this my 6th domestic flight in India after the pandemic and my second on Air India. It's also tied India and  South Africa for the country with my second most domestic flights, overtaking Australia but still far behind the US. Kolkata is my most flown airport at 12 flights including this one, ahead of Johannesburg at 10 and Perth at 9. Including this flight, it's my 4th flight to or from Mumbai. This is my 30th Star Alliance flight, 6th Air India Group/Vistara flight, 35th Airbus flight, 25th A320 family flight, and 4th A320neo flight (all the stats are post-COVID).
Usually I would publish a routing here but I have no idea what my next flight will be.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Airport

Kolkata Airport is named after Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist and leader of the Indian National Army, which cooperated with Japan and Nazi Germany in order to gain Indian independence from the United Kingdom. It's called CCU because the spelling of Kolkata used under the British Raj was Calcutta. 

Air India's new colors and designs are everywhere.

Because it was barely an hour before departure all the passengers on this flight were being taken to the front of the line which was very helpful. Check-in was very fast because of this.

There was a long line in security but the flight had gotten delayed so there was some extra time. Boarding started at the normal time though, so by the time I went downstairs to the gate the buses were already filling.

Planespotting & Boarding

The bus let me get some pictures of the aircraft on the ground in CCU. Most the planes were just the normal domestic narrowbodies, but, very interestingly, there was an Air India 787-8 at the far side of the tarmac, nowhere near the terminal (they don't usually fly widebodies into CCU) and something I've never seen in CCU before, an Air France (cargo?) widebody. Neither of these showed up on Flightradar so I'm not sure what the story is with them.

Today's aircraft is VT-RTO, a 0.9 year old A320neo delivered to Air India in November 2023. It is one of the newer planes in the Air India fleet. I was able to get a lot of pictures of it from the bus…

…and during the long, long line for boarding.

I also got a couple of pictures of the AF plane and the AI 787.

There were a few local A320s around us as well

And finally, boarding

Seat & Departure (+ more planespotting)

All-economy configuration in this A320neo. With the ongoing refurbishment of Air India's narrowbody fleet, I assume that business and premium economy will be added and the livery will be changed. The cabin is in good condition, though, it won't actually need a retrofit for a few years.

Everything was in very good condition. The aircraft is of course less than a year old but I was still a bit uncertain about what the state of the cabin would be.

There are two annoying things. One is that there isn't really a headrest.
(Interestingly, this design is one of the few things that still has the old AI logo)

The other is that the armrest is quite small.

To be honest I barely noticed either of these things during the flight, it wasn't really a big deal.
There were two charging points for every row of three which was a nice surprise.

There is also a device holder, cupholder, tray table, and two storage compartments, one for "literature" and one normal one.

Individual lights and air vents.

The seatback pocket contains a sickness bag, a safety card - unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the inside of it but it was one of the very few airline safety cards that actually had images that made sense, and the new Namaste.ai magazine which I looked through while we were waiting… it was quite a long wait.

There seemed to be a few interesting articles but I didn't read any of them, I just looked at the information page at the end of the magazine.

A bit more planespotting while we keep waiting

And finally we pushed back.

They turned on orange and purple lighting

We went past the terminal before taking off around 40 minutes late

Meal & In-flight

Beautiful sky this afternoon

Air India provides complimentary meals on all flights in all classes, although on flights under two hours they give snack boxes.
Only, it's not that simple.
Air India has different meal services depending on the time of day:

So unfortunately the normal hot meal service wasn't there on this flight, instead there was a "refreshment" served.

On one hand, this was quite disappointing. I had looked at their website before the flight and I knew that we were meant to be served refreshments, but I'd been hoping that there would still be a proper meal service. Air India usually has great meals and this little box was underwhelming.
But to be fair to them, any service on a short domestic flight, especially with a ticket that costed less than $60, is great. Also, non special meals had two boxes, one with the main snack and one with some sides. I believe the options were a vegetarian or non-vegetarian sandwich with 2-3 sides, which is quite reasonable. Unfortunately with the special meal there was only this:

They were good fruits but there was nothing else with them which was a shame.
Beverage service started after the refreshments but there was a bit of turbulence so the crew had to stop for a while. Eventually they restarted. The options were tea, coffee, and water - not much of a selection. I got water.

The man serving my side of the plane was very friendly and when asked if there was any way to get the extra stuff that non special meal passenger had gotten he said the meals are calculated before the flight but he would try. A few minutes later his colleague came back with not one but two snack boxes (I only had one). This was very nice of them, I really appreciated it.

One of the fanciest looking cutlery packets I've seen:

The sandwich was simple, just bread and cheese. It was nice but a bit dry. The mango yogurt was really good, I could have had a couple more.

I used the bathroom once during the flight, it was cleaner than I'd expected. As I was waiting for the beverage carts to pass by I noticed the coffee jug seemed to be from Vistara.

Cabin view:

The rest of the flight was uneventful.
There were some nice views of the sunset as we got closer to Mumbai. Parts of the sky were orange and red but some of it was also a very beautiful blue. The cabin also turned blue soon (but not naturally).

Arrival & Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport

There was a great sunset, and also a bit of lightning which was cool although I couldn't get pictures of it.
The orange and purple lighting was turned on again as we got closer to Mumbai.

And finally, landing. We made back some time during the flight but were still around half an hour late, not too bad.
Welcome to Maharashtra! 

I didn't see any international planes sadly. Just the usual domestic aircraft. There were however a few parked Go First A320s. The lights made it hard to get good pictures of anything.
We sat next to the Alliance Air plane for a while before finally getting to our gate.

Last view of the seats:

I tried to get a picture of our plane from the jetbridge but mostly failed

We parked next to an Air India Dreamliner in the Star Alliance livery.

It was a long, long, long, long walk to baggage claim. There was some nice artwork on the walls but I didn't get pictures of it. I was mostly focusing on the planes, but the reflections made it very hard to get pictures of that too

Bags also took a while to arrive.

That concludes this report. Thanks for reading.