Business
Aiming to Be the Next Emirates, Air India Makes Record Jet Buy
New owner Tata Group is spending an estimated $60 billion on 470 planes from Airbus and Boeing to expand the carrier’s global presence.
This article is for subscribers only.
India reached a milestone at the end of last year when it overtook China as the world’s most populous nation. But that explosive growth is hardly reflected in the size of its commercial aviation fleet. Today the entire country has only about 700 aircraft—fewer than United Airlines Holdings Inc. alone—and just 50 widebody jets to transport its increasingly mobile 1.41 billion people.
Chinese carriers, by contrast, operate about 480 twin-aisle aircraft, and Emirates, whose base of Dubai has a fraction of the population of Mumbai, boasts a widebody fleet of 260 jetliners, according to figures from Cirium, which aggregates aviation data.