Air India has received the first Airbus A320neo aircraft (registration VT-RTN) painted in the airline’s new livery.
The aircraft was delivered new from the factory in Toulouse, France, on July 6, 2024, and flew to Delhi (DEL), where it arrived the next day after a nonstop flight that took eight hours and 17 minutes.
Although this is not the first A320neo that Air India has received (India’s flag carrier has been operating this type of aircraft since 2017 and currently has 47 of them in the fleet, plus nine A320s of the older ceo version), the delivery attracted a great deal of attention due to being the first to sport the carrier’s new livery. It is also the first A320neo to be delivered from the 250 aircraft order that Air India placed with Airbus in 2023.
The order, which was placed in February 2023 and later firmed up in June during the 2023 Paris Air Show, originally comprised 140 A320neo and 70 A321neo aircraft. However, this was later tweaked in December 2023 to up-gauge the order by inverting the proportions between the two types of aircraft, to 140 A321neo and 70 A320neos aircraft.
The same order also included 34 A350-1000 and six A350-900 long-haul aircraft.