New Delhi: Thales and IndiGo, India’s largest airline, have signed a strategic maintenance contract for the airline’s current fleet of 430 Airbus A320 aircraft and future order of over 800 A32X aircraft.
As part of this 11-year contract, Thales will provide IndiGo with expert repair services for avionics components, coupled with Thales’s ‘Avionics-By-The-Hour’ (ABTH) programme – a comprehensive spares management solution that ensures the availability of critical components to minimise aircraft downtime. This, together with Thales’s ‘Repair-By-The-Hour’ (RBTH), guarantees timely maintenance for avionics, allowing IndiGo to increase the availability of its fleet and expedite repairs.
Repairs will be managed notably at Thales’s new state-of-the-art avionics MRO facility in Gurugram, India, located near the Delhi airport, which is designed to handle the increasing demand for avionics support, featuring advanced technology to streamline repair processes and ensure high levels of fleet availability. Thales’s skilled technicians specialise in maintaining complex avionics systems with repairs that meet stringent safety and regulatory standards.
IndiGo has also extended a 5-year contract with AvioBook, a Thales company, for AvioBook Flight —the only Electronic Flight Bag solution currently authorised for paperless operations by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). In use across the entire IndiGo fleet for over a year, AvioBook Flight has already helped significantly reduce consumption of paper usage annually thereby advancing environmental sustainability goals and streamlining flight operations on over 2,000 flights every day.
“We are pleased to partner with Thales, a leading aerospace company trusted worldwide for its expertise in avionics support, to augment IndiGo’s maintenance and repairs capabilities. With IndiGo’s growing scale and fleet, this association aligns with our commitment to offer a hassle-free and safe flying experience to our customers, while ensuring operational excellence and reliability.” Parichay Datta, Senior Vice-president, Engineering, IndiGo.
“This strategic partnership with IndiGo underscores our commitment to delivering airline world-class avionics support and services. Our new MRO facility in India increases Thales’s ability to provide a swift, reliable service, backed by the power of our global organisation, to meet the evolving demands of the Indian aviation industry.” Thomas Got, Vice President, Aviation Global Services, Thales.
