Air India CEO and Managing Director Campbell Wilson announced his resignation on April 7, 2026, ending a nearly four-year tenure leading the Tata Group-owned carrier through a sweeping post-privatization transformation.
Wilson, a New Zealand national who joined Air India in July 2022 after more than 25 years at Singapore Airlines, said he had informed Air India Chairman N. Chandrasekaran of his intention to step down as far back as 2024. He will remain in the role until the airline’s board appoints a successor. A search committee has been formed.
In a statement published by the airline, Wilson pointed to the scope of the changes carried out under his leadership: the acquisition and merger of four airlines into the current Air India group, more than 100 aircraft added to the fleet, the near-completion of narrowbody cabin retrofits, the start of widebody deliveries with new custom-designed interiors, and investments in training and maintenance infrastructure including South Asia’s largest aviation training academy and a greenfield MRO base.
Wilson described the current moment as a natural transition point, noting a window before deliveries from the airline’s nearly 600-strong order book begin arriving in volume from 2027.
Chandrasekaran acknowledged what he called Wilson’s tenacity in navigating a challenging operating environment, including prolonged post-Covid supply chain constraints, delivery delays for new aircraft and retrofit programs, and what he described as major geopolitical headwinds.
A carrier under pressure
The departure comes at a difficult moment for Air India. The airline and its low-cost arm Air India Express posted a combined loss of 98 billion rupees ($1.05 billion) in fiscal 2024-2025, and the carrier is widely reported to be heading for even steeper losses in the current financial year.
The airline has been under sustained regulatory and public scrutiny since the crash of Flight AI171 on June 12, 2025, when a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner went down shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people. The crash, still under investigation, was the first fatal hull loss of a Boeing 787 and remains the deadliest aviation disaster of the 2020s.
Air India’s operations have also been disrupted by Pakistan’s closure of its airspace to Indian carriers, which forced costly reroutings of long-haul services, and by wider regional instability linked to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Leadership transition across Indian aviation
Wilson’s background was primarily in low-cost aviation. He was the founding CEO of Scoot, Singapore Airlines’ budget subsidiary, and led the carrier in two separate stints. Before joining Air India, he served as Singapore Airlines’ senior vice president of sales and marketing.
In a June 2025 interview with AeroTime, Wilson outlined the scale of the transformation underway, describing significant room for growth as India’s per capita air travel remained well below that of comparable markets.
The announcement also comes days after rival IndiGo named former IATA chief Willie Walsh as its next CEO, signaling a broader moment of leadership change across India’s airline industry.
