Air India, Vistara gets DGCA approval to integrate aircraft line maintenance operations

NEW DELHI: In a significant move towards operational synergy, Air India and Vistara have secured the CAR (Civil Aviation Requirement) 145 approval from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to integrate their aircraft line maintenance operations, as per an official release.

As per the release, this strategic integration will merge Vistara's Line Maintenance activities under Air India's facilities and scope, marking a key milestone in unifying the maintenance resources of both airlines.

By leveraging the combined expertise and optimizing processes, resources and systems this merger will significantly enhance Air India's technical capabilities, ensuring greater self-reliance in fleet maintenance, and implement industry-leading practices across all MRO operations.

This will result in optimising resources to enhance operational performance and reduce aircraft turnaround times to bolster on-time performance (OTP).

With a unified maintenance team and resources, Air India will be better positioned to service a mixed fleet of widebody and narrowbody aircraft, enhancing schedule integrity and reliability of operations.

Air India has so far in-housed line maintenance at 12 stations in India and the move will further bolster the in-house line maintenance capabilities of Air India by making it more self-reliant and streamlined.

This will also allow key technical activities related to aircraft and its components to come under a single integrated scope and ambit of work, as per the release.

The merger will not only bolster core line maintenance work to keep the combined fleet of Air India and Vistara flying fit within the eco-system of Air India but will also result in embracing the best industry practices for all MRO activities strengthening the overall capacity of the Engineering capacity and resources.

The combined strength of the Air India Maintenance team will bring every aspect of work under one umbrella and help streamline and co-ordinate the work processes and systems of the diverse technical teams hitherto involved in the process, it added. Enhanced synergy of the combined resources will also ensure real-time availability of records of all activities for fast diagnosis and troubleshooting of technical issues by tracing and correcting of the systems involved.

The combined strength will also create economies of scale in resource mobilization and augment trained manpower to cater to various maintenance and check of the aircraft in the fleet of the Group Carriers, including Air India Express- the aircraft of which has been serviced by the Vistara team, the release added.