Air India Group accounted for 39.8% of significant aircraft defects reported since 2023
Government data cited by Outlook Business shows Air India Group logged 963 of 2,420 significant defects from January 2023 to June 2026. Air India’s reported defects rose from 167 in 2023 to 398 in 2025, as the carrier also faces a DGCA investigation into severe turbulence on a Phuket-Delhi flight.
What happened
Government data shows Air India Group accounted for 39.8% of significant airline defects reported since 2023. Air India’s defect count more than doubled through
Key facts
- Air India Group reported 963 of 2,420 significant defects between January 2023 and June 2026 (39.8%)
- Air India reported 844 defects, nearly 35% of the total
- Air India defects rose from 167 in 2023 to 233 in 2024 and 398 in 2025
- Air India Express reported 9 defects in 2024 and 78 in 2025
- In the first half of 2026, Air India and Air India Express reported 46 and 53 defects respectively
- Akasa Air reported 152 defects and IndiGo 47 in the first half of 2026
- Air India operates 191 aircraft and has ordered more than 500 planes, estimated at up to $80 billion
- Air India reported a FY26 net loss of ₹22,238 crore
Why this matters
Any partnership, fleet, services or airport-growth strategy involving Air India should include heightened diligence on maintenance capabilities, compliance systems and brand-risk exposure.
What to watch
- DGCA audit findings, enforcement actions, route or aircraft restrictions, and mandated inspections.
- Monthly defect rates per aircraft and per flight cycle, rather than absolute defect counts.
- Aircraft-on-ground days, cancellation rates, delays attributable to technical issues, and last-minute equipment swaps.
- Further severe turbulence, technical-diversion, or emergency-landing incidents involving Air India Group.
- Changes in passenger complaints, social sentiment, corporate-travel account retention, and Net Promoter Score.
- Yield trends, load factors, compensation costs, and insurance or leasing-cost changes relative to IndiGo and international peers.
- Progress in fleet replacement, cabin retrofits, maintenance hiring, spare-engine availability, and MRO capacity.
- Accelerate preventive maintenance, component tracking, and reliability analytics across Air India and Air India Express fleets.
- Publish fleet-normalized reliability and corrective-action metrics to distinguish higher reporting volumes from worsening safety performance.
- Temporarily prioritize schedule resilience over aggressive aircraft utilization on high-visibility domestic and international routes.
- Strengthen passenger disruption protocols, including proactive rebooking, compensation, and real-time maintenance-related communication.
- Review supplier, MRO, spare-parts, and engineering-capacity bottlenecks that could turn defects into extended aircraft-on-ground events.
- Ring-fence Tata Group reputational exposure by ensuring consistent safety messaging across travel, hospitality, retail, and loyalty touchpoints.