Dreamliner deliveries to be 7 months late: Vistara

Bloomberg

Singapore Airlines Ltd’s Indian joint venture expects the last four Dreamliners from its Boeing order to arrive by October 2022, a delay of up to seven months as the US planemaker addresses flaws with the jet and the pandemic weighs on air travel.
Vistara, which Singapore Airlines jointly owns with conglomerate Tata Group, has received two Boeing 787 Dreamliners and will get the four others on order in 12 to 15 months, Chief Commercial Officer Vinod Kannan said in an interview. Vistara previously said it would receive all six by March next year.
Boeing’s Dreamliner program has been disrupted by the discovery of defects in the fuselage and nose, leading to a halt in deliveries for much of the past 10 months. Restarting those is crucial for the Chicago-based company, which has about 100 of the jets in storage and burned through about $20 billion last year.
Vistara is also in talks with Airbus about its order of 13 A320neo-family of jets and is negotiating with manufacturers and lessors to see if they can reduce costs or make changes to payment timetables, according to Kannan. “We are spacing out our deliveries and pushing some to next year,” he said. “There have been commercial discussions to see how we can better match delivery stream to the projected
demand.”
A Boeing spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on conversations with customers. An Airbus spokesman said the company is in constant dialog with all customers, the details of which remain confidential. Kannan said Vistara is on track to have a fleet of 70 aircraft by 2023, though it received five or six fewer jets in the 2021 financial year than initially planned. The current 48-strong fleet includes 37 Airbus A320s and three A321neos.
Vistara’s home market, India, has been hit particularly hard by Covid-19, with about 420,000 deaths and over 31 million cases officially, though the actual numbers could be worse. Vistara is considering installing a specialised resting area for crew on its 787-9 Dreamliners on order, or taking jets with those spaces already fitted on lease.