Aviation News

Air India CEO & MD Campbell Wilson, Infra News, ET Infra

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 Campbell Wilson
Campbell Wilson

NEW DELHI: The decision of the government to keep out maintenance, repair & overhaul company AI Engineering Services Ltd or AIESL, which provides engineering services to Air India, from the disinvestment process, has created a tough road ahead for Air India with regard to maintenance and servicing of its fleet.

Speaking at CAPA India Aviation Summit 2023 in Delhi on Monday, Air India’s Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Campbell Wilson stated that development of in-house engineering capability is a matter of deep consideration.

While AIESL, continues to be owned and operated by the government, Air India was sold to Tata Sons in a disinvestment process in January of 2022 for Rs. 18,000 crore. The government has now separately started a disinvestment process for AIESL

“What was one of the negative surprises, with effectively from day one of privatisation, Air India’s engineering capability disappeared, it was retained by the government. Since then we had to build engineering capability in-house,” said Wilson.

Currently AIESL continues to provide maintenance and engineering services to Air India but the same will last only until the end of next year.

“But what happens after that, there is a matter of deep consideration, given our expansion, given our maintenance fleet,” said Wilson.

“We are using some services from third party…Hong Kong…sometime Singapore…but ultimately we will need to build (capability) lot more in-house…,” said Wilson.

While India has presence of domestic aircraft maintenance, repair & overhaul companies such as AIESL, Air Works, GMR Aero Technic among others, much of the high-end aircraft heavy maintenance and redelivery checks are undertaken outside the country at MRO hubs in Singapore, Hong Kong and Middle East, leading to a huge foreign exchange outgo from the country.



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