AFAIK, IT flies to SIN only from BOM. So does IT-29 arrive in SIN at 0725 and then sit in Changi until IT-30 takes off at 1810? An expensive plane idle for almost 11 hours?

If that is not so, where does the aircraft go?

its good for people like me who often have to make day trips to singapore....

Maybe they do maintenance at SATS?

dont think so, since its very frequent (everyday for approx 9-10 hrs )

But they may take turns with aircraft, giving a particular 330 airframe say a trip to SIN once/twice every week... (The current A330 fleet size appears to be 5.)

hmmm.. possible ..

Well the same is true of Hong Kong - arrival 7am, return 5/6pm.
Even 9W to Hong Kong as well.

Also 9W to SIN - same thing from BOM - 330 idle all day.
MAA-SIN-MAA and DEL-SIN-DEL are turn arounds.

Interesting. Thats a lot of down time for a aircraft.

Does IT even make money on this route? It seems to be very over saturated with IT, 9W, AI, SQ & QF competing.

I wish they would start a BLR-SIN service, a market which is monopolized by SQ who fill their planes even at a ridiculous sum of $1000 for a Y roundtrip (heck, EK can get me to London for less than that).

For IT/9W in SIN, as noted above they have long stopovers. I'm not sure about 9W from MAA, but from Delhi, the stopover is still a good 7 hours.

IT I do believe early on in the route was doing very poorly, mainly because they were not being sold by TA. I also think IT can have a big influence on the Indian market in Singapore, if they decide to reschedule their times, to maybe either a double daily or to depart out at 9am or something like that a la Air India. My personal feeling is that IT has a pretty good reputation in Singapore with the likes of SQ and if they can sell fares to not only India but beyond India as well that may work for them, so they can feed off the BLR/DEL/other smaller cities traffic which would have otherwise gone to 9W/SQ.

When I book my flights from Singapore - Delhi, IT looses out because of the overnight connection in Bombay, 9W I also question on the flight timings of 11pm to 2am, that is I do believe too late for connections to Europe and too early for the early morning connections to India, which realistically leaves most passengers with SQ/AI, and AI isn't really a preferred carrier for those who can afford it.

That's just my thoughts on the Singapore India sector, of course we also have to keep in mind that IT/AI/9W although who could be connecting carriers as well are focusing on O+D market, whereas SQ is focusing on the transiting passengers to Australia/USA

The layover used to be much less than what it is now. It used to depart at around 11am-1pm with an arrival back at about 5-6pm. They changed it to an evening departure from SIN due to business demands etc.

My wife used to love this layover as Crew. She used to get into SIN at around 8am, sleeps till about 4pm, goes out in evening for shopping, dinner and party, gets back to the hotel at around 2-4am, sleep till about 2pm, fly back to India at 5pm.

Hong Kong is also the same.

I landed in HKG this afternoon, and saw both the 9W and IT planes parked in remote bays (idling). So, yes, they do nothing with those birds for a while every day those who land up in HKG or SIN

I recently flew this leg and the IT flight was packed in all classes; I think they have an advantage vis-a-vis carriers such as QF & SF since a lot of their traffic originates in other stations (e.g. I originated in AMD that evening). Keeping the plane idle in SIN for so long is silly IMO .. they could easily extend the flight to DPS (or even JKT), where they would make a killing even without fifth freedom rights.
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