Air India’s Airbus A350 makes maiden ferry flight from Singapore to Toulouse

Air India’s first Airbus A350 aircraft has crisscrossed the globe, flying from Asia to Europe before joining the airline’s fleet. The airline’s first A350 has been spotted multiple times by plane watchers at the Airbus facility in Toulouse, France, and Air India itself unveiled the plane with a new livery last month.

ferry service

Air India has big plans for its Airbus A350 aircraft. The company plans to take advantage of the aircraft’s long range and improved fuel efficiency by introducing it on some of its long-haul routes. And we recently got a glimpse of what such a flight would be like when this aircraft made a ferry flight from Singapore to Toulouse, France (at the time of writing it was somewhere over Pakistan ).

This is not the first time this aircraft has been spotted before it was eventually inducted into Air India. Simple Flying has been tracking its flights over the past few months and reported on its maiden flight in August.

At the time, the A350, with its all-white fuselage, flew for nearly three hours over the Bay of Biscay, La Rochelle and Bordeaux before finally landing in Toulouse.

And in October, Air India unveiled the first look at the aircraft after its paint job in Toulouse, giving the A350 a brand new Air India livery. This was essentially a preview by the airline ahead of its official introduction to its fleet in the coming weeks.

More wide bodies coming soon

Air India currently has 470 aircraft on order from both Boeing and Airbus. Of these, 70 are widebody aircraft, including 40 Airbus A350s. By December, Air India will take delivery of its first A350, with five more A350s expected to join its fleet in the coming months. The six aircraft were originally scheduled to fly with Russia’s Aeroflot.

Air India went on a widebody buying spree last year, leasing several Boeing 777s that previously served airlines such as Delta Air Lines and Etihad Airways. This allowed us to immediately expand part of our North American business. Air India will further strengthen its international presence once the A350 begins to take off.

Expanding network

All these new planes, together with the fixed and non-landing planes, mean that Air India’s network can be expanded significantly. The airline plans to add more than 400 weekly flights to its network until March next year, covering popular domestic and international destinations.

Photo: Rahul Sapra | Shutterstock

The airline has already increased capacity on routes in North America and Europe, and is also developing a strategy to improve service to premium domestic trunk routes. In total, Air India plans to add 200 flights each to its domestic and international networks, and the recently highlighted A350 is likely to play a key role in this.

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