Story of Takeoff to Turbulence

✍ By Sarthak Jain | 🌍 India | 📅 Wed Oct 22 2025

How Go Air lost altitude in a crowded sky

Indian aviation market is one of the most competitive sector of India. It has seen rise and fall of many airlines which filled the Indian skies. One of them was Go Air or more recently known as Go First. It was another Low Cost Carrier, promising wings for the common Indian man. Founded in 2005 by the Wadia group, around the same time as Indigo, , it had a strong financial backing along with a young aircraft fleet of A320s. It had all the right ingredients for a successful airline and roared into the 2010s by announcing international destinations including Muscat. It also introduced online check in, a trail blazer for the industry, and provided premium services add ons. All these made Go Air a formidable opponent for Indigo. However, dark clouds started to appear on the horizon for the airline. Pratt and Whitney, main supplier for engines of A320s, offered new and advanced engines to Go Air as a costlier alternative. This started the problems which ultimately led to the downfall of Go Air. P&W started to delay on their engine orders. This led to an engine shortage for all Indian airlines, including Indigo. Indigo, however, had a very large fleet because it works on bulk ordering model. In short, Indigo, since buying in bulk, got huge discounts on purchases thus creating a large fleet. Hence, they were able to offset the engine shortage problem by using the older A320neos. This was not the case for Go Air which primarily worked on the leasing model and thus had a leaner fleet. Soon they were ordered to ground 25 aircrafts which lead to losses of about 208 billion dollars. This caused a liquidity crunch in the company which even delayed salaries for the airline staff ultimately leading to an exodus of pilots and other personnels. Soon they defaulted on the payments to the lessors amounting up to 460 million dollars. Moreover, Indigo’s brilliant crisis management gave Go Air stiff competition which ultimately lost a large percentage of the market to the former. Finally on May 3rd 2023, Go Air filed for bankruptcy and hearing started in the NCLT. The company claim ed that its 54 aircrafts are it’s assets out of which 28 are grounded. The NCLT granted protection to the airline thus giving it valuable time to liquify its assets and payback the vendors and lessors. However this did not work and DGCA deregistered all 54 aircrafts of Go Air and now the council of creditors have started to liquify the company in an attempt to recoup their losses when any viable bid failed to materialize. The company is now in its last leg of the insolvency process.