Come July 27, Vistara will stop operating the last of its B737 planes. In a few weeks, the aircraft will also leave Vistara’s fleet. Incidentally, this aircraft was the first one acquired by Vistara in June 2019.
With this, Vistara becomes only the second Indian airline, after Akasa Air to have an all next generation fleet.
The airline, a JV of the Tata group with SIA, launched services in January 2015 with an Airbus fleet. It later added other aircraft including the Airbus narrowbody and the Boeing widebody aircraft in 2018. Vistara is slated to merge with Air India next year.
The surprise element of the fleet has been the B737NG, the first of which entered the fleet in June 2019, given that its out-of-production date was already known by then.
A couple of days before Jet Airways shut down in April 2019, Vistara rejigged its network, adding flights between Bengaluru and Mumbai to fill the void left by Jet Airways. Given its limited fleet, the airline had withdrawn flights from Chennai and Kolkata to accommodate the new flights. Other airlines followed suit and that led to a huge hue and cry, with airports and passengers complaining about the withdrawal of routes.
Subsequently, the Jet Airways slots were given out to airlines subject to additional capacity being inducted. While IndiGo had a steady stream of A320 neo family aircraft coming in, Vistara and SpiceJet chose another route, that of inducting aircraft available with Jet Airways into their fleet. The crew and staff of Jet Airways was trained and readily available and this helped Vistara and SpiceJet create jobs and expand operations while also using the leased planes that would otherwise have just been sitting idle.
Vistara inducted Jet’s B737 aircraft and soon had a peak fleet size of nine. Owing to operational challenges, the airline gradually let these planes go. Two of the nine B737s are with Air India Express, while two are stored. One each is operating in Australia, Russia, Spain and the USA. Where the last aircraft is headed, remains to be seen.
26/07/2023 Ameya Joshi/Moneycontrol
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