I Flew Air India Economy for Fifteen Hours From New York to Delhi

Air India has spent the last few years trying to convince people it's a different airline than the one they remember, and the Airbus A350 is the aircraft doing most of that arguing. It's the newest and largest thing the airline flies, it wears the new paint scheme, and it gets put on the routes the airline most wants to be judged on. New York to Delhi is one of those.

This route matters because it's one of the few places Air India competes on something other than price. Flying nonstop from JFK to Delhi is a genuine advantage over connecting through the Gulf, which is how a large share of this traffic still moves. Emirates, Qatar and Etihad will all sell you Delhi with one stop, usually cheaper. Air India's pitch is that you skip that stop. So the real question isn't whether a new aircraft beats a seventeen-year-old one. It's whether fifteen and a half hours in the back of this one beats changing planes in Dubai or Doha.

I flew it in economy to find out.

Ground Experience

Check-in at Terminal 4 had a line, though nothing that felt out of hand, and it moved. The airline doesn't have its own terminal at JFK and it shows in the way the operation borrows space, but the desks were staffed and I was through without a story to tell about it.

Past security, the concourse itself was the surprise. T4 can be genuinely unpleasant when several long-haul flights push back at once, and I've been through it on worse afternoons. This one was calm. Air India departs from the A gates, which sit on the shorter arm of the terminal. That's a real advantage if you've ever walked the full length of the other side to a far gate with a rolling bag.

What sticks with me is the wheelchair count. There were 46 passengers requiring wheelchair assistance on my flight, and when I mentioned it to the gate agent she laughed and said she's seen well over a hundred on this route. That number tells you something about who flies JFK to Delhi that no passenger statistic would. This is family travel, elderly passengers going home or going to visit, and a boarding process that starts long before the rest of us are called.

She also mentioned the load was light, which it was. I'd caution against reading too much into one flight, and the airline hasn't said anything publicly about demand on this route, so I'm noting it rather than explaining it.

Boarding and First Impressions

Boarding took a while, which is what happens when 46 wheelchairs go first, and the crew handled it without visible strain. Agents worked the queue properly and the sequence held together.

Illustrated for The Contrail

Air India Airbus A350-900 · VT-JRI

Drawn by Caleb St. John · Caleb's Aviation

Every Contrail review carries an original drawing of the aircraft flown, made for us by Caleb St. John, matching the exact registration in the flight details above.

At the door I got one of the better greetings I've had in economy this year. Two crew, both engaged, neither doing the thing where they look past you at the next person. That sounds like a small thing. Over the next fifteen hours it set the tone for everything after.

Walking in, I was struck by how much pride the airline seems to take in this aircraft. You can feel it in how the crew talk about the cabin and how well-kept it is. Air India got handed an opportunity with these A350s, and my read from the door was that they know it.

Then the row situation happened, and it's my favorite thing that happened on this flight. With the light cabin load, the crew were letting people move into empty rows. I asked. The man behind me asked the flight attendant for the same row at roughly the same moment, in Hindi, and what followed was an exchange I only half understood but thoroughly enjoyed. She gave it to me and told him he was too slow. He took it well. Everyone laughed. Ten minutes later there was a full-cabin search for a woman's lost earring, which they found.

That's a crew enjoying its job, and it's not something you can put in a seat map.

Seat

I was assigned 21D and moved to an empty window triple before departure once the crew signed off on it. So my read on the seat comes with an asterisk, because three seats to yourself changes a fifteen-hour flight more than any single feature of the product does.

Judged as a seat rather than as a row, it holds up. Headrests are the standout here, properly cushioned and soft in a way a lot of economy headrests aren't. On an overnight flight that matters more to me than an extra inch of legroom. Cabin condition was good throughout, clean and unmarked, which you'd hope for on a two-year-old airframe and don't always get.

Two complaints. Tray tables are flimsy, with enough flex that a full cup feels precarious, and mine wasn't clean when I sat down. Armrests are harder than they need to be too, which you notice around hour eight.

Amenities

Start with the screens, because they're good. Its interface is quick and the layout makes sense. There are also external cameras, which I call out every time because they're among the more interesting things on a seatback screen and hardly anybody finds them.

Wi-Fi is complimentary, and in economy on a sector this long that's worth real money. Its behavior was strange, though. Nothing worked when I boarded. It connected on its own without me touching anything, ran reasonably well for about five hours, and died for the last two or three. Entertainment went with it near the end, leaving a handful of movies and no map, so for the final stretch I had no idea where we were or how long was left.

Systems that give up before you land are more frustrating than modest ones that hold, and the score reflects that. Something that works well and then quits before you land is more frustrating than something modest that holds.

Catering

Drink service came round first, and the cranberry juice tasted like sugar water. Sour cream and onion corn nuts were excellent, though, and the crew came back round with seconds. I suspect that was the light load.

Then things slowed down. Meals arrived about two hours after departure. Some of that was moderate turbulence that paused the service around the halfway point of the cabin, but it was already slow before the turbulence started, so I won't hand the whole delay to the weather.

Choices were butter chicken with rice or paneer with rice. I took the chicken, and it was the weakest part of the tray. Portion was small and the sauce had almost no seasoning, which for butter chicken is a particular kind of disappointment. Everything around it was better. Rice and sides were good, and the dessert was the one thing I'd order again.

Halfway through came a basil pesto pizza, the only snack option, and it had the consistency of tire rubber. It also fell apart when I picked it up. They served it, with some irony, right as we crossed Italy.

Breakfast was an omelette, chosen mostly because I didn't catch the full list of options. It was workable, which is the fairest word for most of what came out of that galley, and I mean it as a middle-ranking rather than an insult.

Service

This crew is the reason the review scores where it does rather than lower.

Door greeting, row negotiation and earring search all happened inside the first hour, and they were the kind of interactions that make a cabin feel run by people rather than by a manual. An hour after the meal, crew came through the aisles with cups of water without being asked. Unprompted water laps have disappeared from a lot of long-haul economy. There's no snack counter you can help yourself from, but when I went back and asked they gave me two kinds of cookies without hesitation, even if the portions were small.

Where it fell short was consistency. Once the meal service was done, the tone went functional and a little cold. Lavatory trash was already full partway through the flight and it wasn't especially clean. Cabin lights came all the way up at almost exactly the midpoint of an overnight flight, which felt arbitrary. And the crew didn't ask anyone to close window shades, which I'll admit is a contested point among passengers but does make a difference when half the cabin is trying to sleep.

Passenger behavior didn't help. People were playing reels out loud, which isn't the airline's fault but is something crew can address and didn't.

At the end, the cabin manager came and introduced himself and asked me to leave feedback on the flight. I have no idea whether he'd worked out what I was doing, but the timing was good.

The Verdict

This cabin is a better product than the airline's reputation, and the gap between those two things is the story of this whole transformation project. The cabin is genuinely well kept. Seats are comfortable in the places that matter overnight, screens are quick and well laid out, and the Wi-Fi costs nothing.

What holds it back is execution rather than hardware. A two-hour wait for a meal. A main course with no seasoning. A snack nobody should have to eat, and systems that gave up before Delhi. None of those require a new aircraft to fix. They require the operation around the aircraft to catch up to it.

Would I take it over a Gulf connection? For a nonstop with a crew like that one, and free Wi-Fi for most of the way, yes. I'd eat before I board though.