beyondbrics

Arvind Jadhav, the managing director of Air India, has launched a ferocious broadside against Boeing, the US aircraft manufacturer, from the UK’s Farnborough Air Show.

Jadhav faces the enormous challenge of reviving the fortunes of India’s loss-making national carrier, which is up against fierce competition from local rivals Jet Airways and Kingfisher in the country’s liberalised air travel market.

The late delivery of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plainly hasn’t helped his cause.

Jadhav describes Boeing’s delivery schedule as a “total disaster”.

“We haven’t got any confidence of the delivery schedules of Boeing,” he says. “They said ‘It will come tomorrow, it will come tomorrow’. It was supposed to come this September. It didn’t come.”

In an interview published by Mint, the Indian business daily, Mr Jadhav explains that Boeing’s broken promises have piled crippling costs onto state-owned Air India. The national carrier has been left without sufficient wide-body aircraft to run its busy medium-haul journeys, like Mumbai to Singapore. Instead, the airline has flown narrow-body aircraft, which incur payload penalties.

Boeing took the Dreamliner to the Farnborough Air Show in the hope that its touch down on a foreign airstrip would reassure customers, like Nippon Airways, Air India and Jet. Jim Albaugh, the chief executive of Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit, said he was confident the Seattle-based aircraft manufacturer would regain its market “leadership” position as the airline industry recovered from losses of $9.4bn last year.

He has his work cut out on customer relations. Air India has asked Boeing to renegotiate the entire order of 787s, and impose stiff penalties on further delays.

Mr Jadhav wants penalties agreed for every day the Dreamliner remains a dream beyond a rescheduled delivery date.

Red faces all round.