Air India To Offer 1st-Class Seats In A350-1000 Planes

Air India will have first class seats in its large wide body A350-1000 planes, with the airline seeing opportunities in the airline's network where these seats will work well as the airline pursues efforts to have a larger pie of the global skies.

Air India's Chief Commercial Officer Nipun Aggarwal said first class is something that most of the top airlines still have a niche on some of the large and prominent routes. "It is not a product that is going away. Many of the top airlines are building their next generation first class products. We are not the only ones doing it. We do feel that there are some opportunities in our network where that product will work well," he said at a media briefing earlier this week. The fleet size of Air India now is 202 planes, including 67 wide body ones. Among them, 27 are B777s, and 40 are B787s. Of the 67 wide body planes, all legacy B777s and some leased B777s have first class seats.

"To compete with the best airlines you need to have first class, it is an aspirational product, it defines how you run and build an airline... we are putting it on A350-1000 aircraft... some of them will have the product. "It takes time to develop the product," Aggarwal said.