Vistara Dreamliners to have back-of-seat IFE screens; onboard Wi-Fi on its A321s and B787s

NEW DELHI: Vistara, the Tata Sons-Singapore Airlines (SIA) JV that has just turned five, will offer inflight Wi-Fi on its single aisle Airbus A321 and the wide body Boeing 787 Dreamliners. The full service carrier (FSC) will have back-of-the-seat inflight entertainment (IFE) screens on its Dreamliners, said a senior official.
The airline is preparing to launch medium haul international flights to destinations like London and Tokyo by this April.
“In the first phase, we will use our Boeing 787-9s for flights to Europe and far east. We have ordered six of these Dreamliners and will get them in over a year, starting next month. In the second phase we will look at flying to America and Australia for which we require a modified version of the B787-9 (that has an extra fuel tank, more thrust and higher maximum takeoff weight). We can get four more Dreamliners as option as part of the previous order and could go for the ultra-long/long range version to do that,” said the official.
The airline currently has ten A321s and six B787s on order. All of these planes, which will be used for medium haul international routes, will have onboard WiFi. “We will use the single aisle A321s for up to 6-hour-long flights. The longer routes will be on the Dreamliners,” the official added.
Vistara will be the first Indian carrier to offer inflight Wi-Fi. SpiceJet also planned to do so on its Boeing 737 Max but that aircraft is globally grounded since last March. Other Indian carriers like Air India and Jet Airways (that shut down last April) also toyed with this idea but their precarious finances did not allow them to do so despite being the only Indian carriers till now to fly to distant places like Americas and Australia.
Big foreign airlines like SIA, Lufthansa, Qatar Airways and Emirates have been offering onboard WiFi for years. Many of them give a basic data package free of cost to economy passengers that has to be topped up by buying packs for continued use. Premium class passengers get either much higher or unlimited data usage.
SIA, Vistara’s 49% stakeholder, for instance has three inflight WiFi price plans: Chat (30MB) for $3.99 which is "optimised for text-only messaging services. Valid for 2 hours only or when the 30 MB limit is reached." Second is pro (100MB) for $9.99 "for web browsing and emails". And then comes premium (200 MB) for $15.99 for "for keeping up with work".