On each Air India flight, 2-3 passengers lose their checked bag!

By Leila

Recently a report listed Air India as the world’s worst airline when it comes to losing passenger’s checked in bags. Air India loses as many as 33000+ bags every month across its network.

I was trying to calculate how many flights Air India operates per day. This information is NOT readily available online, so I had to try to calculate myself: Below are my assessment

Air India has about 145 planes, serves 37 international and 44 domestic destinations. Around 60 wide body planes and rest are narrow body.

International destinations are served at max 1 flight per day, often only 3-4 days a week

Domestic flights- 2 hour flight, 1-2 hours at the airport (taxi, wait for boarding/de-boarding, fuel, baggage & food loading/unloading, maintenance)- so 4 hours per flight means an aircraft can do max 6 flights per day. I don’t think every aircraft operates 24 hours a day- there will be maintenance work at night, some aircrafts will be out of service, there will be delays etc. So let us assume 4 flights per day for each aircraft- about 80+ planes making 4 flights per day= 320 flights per day, 60 wide body planes making average 2 flights per day= 120 flights, total of 440 flights per day

Air India is losing 33000+ bags in a month or 1100 bags per day.  With 440 flights per day, this comes to 2.5 bags per flight. In other words, on every flight, 2 to 3 Air India passengers are likely to lose their checked baggage!

Image credit: This tweet

With an average 200 passengers per plane, this comes to about 1%. Above stat puts probability of losing your bag in an Air India flight at 2%

Sad part is Airline doesn’t have any SOP when a customer reports that his/her bag is lost. They can’t track it, they can’t give a reasonable timeline when it will be delivered, no compensation, no courtesy to paying passengers.

Check this tweet for the plight of an affected passenger:

https://x.com/thekaipullai/status/1807985384380399784