Air India announced Mumbai to New York JFK a few weeks ago in its list of flights from USA to India, though they didn’t put it on sale. But, it is available for booking now. It is the third time Air India has attempted the route since 2007 when it first flew the Mumbai-New York JFK flight. The route has become one of the nine routes for Air India to the USA this winter. One more thing to note is that Hyderabad-Chicago is no longer scheduled.
Air India earlier scheduled to begin this new flight on the 1st of Feb but now it has delayed the beginning of the flight to the 14th of Feb on the eve of valentine’s day. The flight will be 1x daily and will use more premium heavy 238 seater 777-200LR rather than lower premium, 342 seater 777-300ER. The flights from USA to India have got a healthier and more competitive carrier in the face of this new flight.
The schedule of the flight is as follows:
Mumbai to New York JFK: AI119, 00:55 to 06:55( 16 hours 30 minutes block time)
New York JFK to Mumbai: AI116, 10:55 to 11:35( 14 hour 10 minute block time)
Air India seems no stranger to the route for their direct flights to Mumbai from USA. According to the US department of transportation data, Air India served on this route Non-stop between August 2007-October 2010, then again from December 2018 to March 2019. Delta, the American airline used to operate from 2006 to 2008 and from December 2019 to march 2020.
The Mumbai-New York JFK PTP market is very promising. Data shows that 157,000 roundtrip point-to-point passengers flew Mumbai-New York JFK in 2019. The fair they paid was about $540 each way excluding taxes and fuel surcharge. The fare was the highest of all significant India-America markets and 10 percent higher than Mumbai-Newark. Travel deals online offered by tripbeam though had very competitive prices for last minute flights to India.
As of November this month, Air India has 843 India-USA flights this winter, up by a quarter over the 653 it had in winter 2019. Since the routes have risen from five to nine, so does the frequency of the flights.
No more Hyderabad-Chicago flights
In Jan of the previous year, Air India launched the Hyderabad-Chicago, a long market of 14000km. It attracted a total of 101,000 annual P2P passengers which made the Chicago-Hyderabad second-largest US market after San Francisco. Though it was scheduled to operate this winter at least 1x weekly using 777-200LRs but it no longer will.
According to the US transportation department, Air India carried 7526 roundtrip passengers between Hyderabad and Chicago in 2021. With this many passengers, it had a seat load factor of 87 percent, the highest of all its US-India flights that year and well above the average seat load factor of 74 percent. Though SLF is only one performance element, it had few seats to sell and it was a time of the air travel bubble.
