Air India Express

Air India Express is the low-cost arm of the Tata group's airline business. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Air India Limited and shares its Gurugram head office, at the Vatika One on One complex, with the parent airline. Where Air India flies a full-service product, Air India Express sells mostly economy-only flights on domestic, Gulf and South-east Asian routes, with meals, seat choice, extra baggage and priority services offered as paid add-ons.

The airline was launched by the then state-owned Air India on 29 April 2005, with a brief to serve South Asia, South-east Asia and the Gulf at low cost. For much of the next decade and a half it ran a fixed fleet of 24 aircraft, with no plans to expand or modernise it, and its head office moved from Delhi to Kochi in 2013.

Under Tata ownership

That changed when Tata Sons bought Air India, together with Air India Express, in a deal signed on 8 October 2021 and completed on 27 January 2022. The Tata group already controlled AirAsia India, and in 2023 it announced that the two low-cost airlines would be combined. AirAsia India was first renamed AIX Connect; the merged airline adopted a new logo and orange-and-turquoise livery on 18 October 2023, moved its head office to Gurugram in late 2023, and completed the legal merger with AIX Connect on 1 October 2024. The combined airline therefore flies both Boeing 737s, from the original Air India Express, and Airbus A320-family aircraft, from AIX Connect and Air India.

The group also placed a large Boeing order at the 2023 Paris Air Show, including 190 Boeing 737 MAX jets; those aircraft were later allocated to Air India Express, with deliveries beginning in September 2023. Early deliveries were MAX 8s originally built for other airlines. The first aircraft fitted out to Air India Express's own specification, its 51st 737 MAX, arrived on 29 December 2025 and was registered VT-RNT in honour of Ratan Tata. In 2025 the airline also introduced a new all-economy cabin, in a 3-3 layout, to be fitted across its 737 MAX and A320-family aircraft.

Fleet and network today

A Wikipedia fleet table dated August 2026 lists 107 aircraft: 53 Boeing 737 MAX 8s and 26 737-800s, alongside 10 A320s, 14 A320neos and 4 A321neos. The airline itself describes a fleet of over 100 Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 aircraft, operating more than 500 daily flights to 49 domestic and 16 international destinations across South, South-east and West Asia. Its main hubs are Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai, and it has codeshare and interline agreements with Air India, Scoot and Singapore Airlines.

The Gulf remains central to the network. For the winter 2026 schedule, which runs until 27 March 2027, the airline said it would operate up to 135 daily departures linking 23 Indian cities with 12 gateways in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and would deploy retrofitted aircraft on several of these routes.

Fare types matter more here than on some rivals. The airline sells hand-baggage-only fares, branded Xpress Lite, alongside fares that include a checked bag, and it serves hot meals only when pre-booked.