One of my pet peeves with my most frequently used airline, Jet Airways is that they don’t invest enough in building up their fleet. While they’ve been focussing on going abroad from India, somewhere down the line they ceded their inside India advantage to Indigo and the other no-frills carriers.
Boeing 737 Max 8 Jet Airways
Jet Airways had placed an order for 75 Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, which they had confirmed at the Dubai Airshow in 2015. These planes will be delivered to Jet Airways as of 2018 onwards. We are hoping Jet Airways would use the opportunity to deliver a newer and better passenger experience to their customers on the new planes. Most of these planes should be used to replace old planes given the average age of their narrow-body fleet is approximately 8 years now. Heck, they still fly a Boeing 737 from October 2002 as well.
Now, Jet Airways has also confirmed that they are in conversations to place the order for more aeroplanes as well. This was something that was known inside the trade for a while but finally has been confirmed by the airline yesterday. As per the CEO Vinay Dube,
We are planning to order 75-100 narrow-bodied aircraft. We plan to place an order by the end of this year. Today we have around 90 narrow-bodied aircraft. We are yet to decide on who to place the order with.
This should supplement the other order in terms of expanding capacity inside the country. Jet Airways cannot look the other way anyway, given Indigo is expanding at an unprecedented pace, with over 450 Airbus 320/320N/321 on order from Airbus, and SpiceJet recently placed an order for 200 aeroplanes from Boeing as well.
Bottomline
The induction of new planes could hopefully swing the opinion of passengers about Jet Airways’ Passenger Experience. A frequent flyer program, an international network and a good domestic network make them my go-to airline, but the seats are getting old and the food is getting worse, and I hope Jet Airways will also use the opportunity to refresh their passenger experience.
They changed so many CEO’s in the last decade, they had no CEO for the last 2 years, their cost cutting shows in every nook and corner of their operation, freqent flyer program and aircrafts. Food and drinks in international sectors especially Premiere and First is not comparable to any of their comparators in those classes. These aircraft orders will never be realised or even if they do then I am sure it is not adding on to their fleet but replacing their ageing domestic 737-400, 737-700 and 737-800’s. Dube their current CEO comes from Delta!! Delta is an ordinary run of the mill airline in US!
Looking at those congested airports in India, where are they going to park all those planes given
No point in buying new aircraft. They have lost the plot already:
1. On service and Customer Experience to Vistara
2. On Domestic Network and Efficiency to Indigo
3. On International Network to Air India.
4. On cost effectiveness to all the low cost carriers: Spicejet, Air Asia India, GoAir & Indigo.
They have become the Jack of all Trades, Master of None. The JV with Skyteam is the only good thing they have going for them and having a better domestic network will help feed the connecting International passengers to this domestic network.
It’s not just food and aircraft, Jet Airways service has become pretty bad. I have been a jet loyal for years but now find Vistara and Indigo much better.