Air India entered February 2026 with its first factory-fit Boeing 787-9 in revenue service on the Mumbai-Frankfurt route, the most visible marker yet that the Tata-era transformation plan known as Vihaan.AI is moving from drawing board into operational cadence. The carrier, reprivatised in January 2022, has spent three years working through a retrofit-heavy programme on its inherited fleet while waiting for new-build deliveries to begin arriving against the 470-aircraft order placed with Airbus and Boeing in February 2023.
The 2026 delivery slate
CEO Campbell Wilson has guided for 26 aircraft inductions across 2026, split between six widebodies and 20 narrowbodies. The widebody slate comprises Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners and Airbus A350-1000s, the latter destined for long-haul routes where Air India has previously relied on legacy 777s and 787-8s. The narrowbody intake is principally Airbus A320neo and A321neo, slotted into a domestic and regional network that Air India and merger partner Vistara are still consolidating.
The February 2023 order — 250 Airbus and 220 Boeing aircraft — was the largest single airline order on record at the time. A subsequent top-up of 100 additional Airbus narrowbodies and a January 2026 announcement of 30 more Boeing aircraft brought firm commitments above 570 frames, locking in delivery streams into the mid-2030s.
Retrofit phase closing
On 31 October 2025 Air India announced the completion of the first phase of its retrofit programme with the final legacy A320neo emerging from interior upgrades. By end-2026 roughly two-thirds of the Boeing 787 fleet is scheduled to be refurbished, with the full widebody retrofit completing by mid-2027. The retrofits address the principal complaint travellers and corporate buyers raised against the carrier in the years immediately after reprivatisation: that newly painted Tata livery still concealed unrefurbished cabins inherited from the state era.
Five strategic vectors
Vihaan.AI was unveiled in September 2022 as a five-year programme structured around five pillars: industry-leading on-time performance, an exceptional customer proposition, dramatic network and fleet growth, a leadership position in technology and sustainability, and an industry-best people proposition. The framing was deliberately broad. Three and a half years in, the publicly visible scorecard is dominated by fleet metrics — orders placed, retrofits completed, factory-fit deliveries received — because those are the categories where progress is most easily measured.
Operational reliability, the metric corporate travel managers care about most when adding Air India to preferred carrier lists, has been harder to read from outside. The carrier has not published a sustained run of OTP data comparable to what European or US majors publish monthly.
Network read
Mumbai-Frankfurt as the launch route for the factory-fit 787-9 is not accidental. Frankfurt is the principal European gateway for premium Indian corporate traffic and the dominant Lufthansa Group hub feeding Air India connection itineraries. The carrier has progressively rebuilt European long-haul, restored North American services and added points in Australia and Southeast Asia under the Vistara merger framework. The single-AOC consolidation of Vistara into Air India was completed in November 2024, leaving the combined entity as India’s flag carrier with a unified order book.
What 2026 measures
For corporate travel buyers the 2026 question is operational, not strategic. The order book is settled. The retrofit programme is closing. What remains to be demonstrated is consistent delivery of the product Air India has been selling in slide decks: lie-flat business class on long-haul, reliable scheduling, a functioning loyalty proposition, and a network depth that lets a Mumbai or Delhi origin compete on connectivity with a Gulf or European hub itinerary. The 26-aircraft 2026 intake is the first year in which Air India’s own narrative — “a year of very visible change,” as Wilson put it — can be checked against the timetable.