Thales Expands IndiGo Partnership with Avionics MRO and AvioBook Solutions
- New 11-year maintenance support contract for IndiGo’s current Airbus A320 fleet and future order of A32X aircraft includes Thales’s avionics ‘By The Hour’ and ‘Repair By The Hour’ programmes.
- Repairs will be managed at Thales’ recently opened MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul) facility in Gurugram, India.
- The AvioBook contract extends usage of the AvioBook Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) solution to the entire IndiGo fleet (650,000 flights per year to date) for five years.
Thales and IndiGo, have signed a strategic maintenance contract for the airline’s current fleet of 430 Airbus A320 aircraft and future order of over 800 A32X aircraft.
As part of this 11-year contract, Thales will provide IndiGo with expert repair services for avionics components, coupled with Thales’s ‘Avionics-By-The-Hour’ (ABTH) programme – a comprehensive spares management solution that ensures the availability of critical components to minimise aircraft downtime.
This, together with Thales’s ‘Repair-By-The-Hour’ (RBTH), guarantees timely maintenance for avionics, allowing IndiGo to increase the availability of its fleet and expedite repairs.
Repairs will be managed notably at Thales’s new state-of-the-art avionics MRO facility in Gurugram, India, located near the Delhi airport, which is designed to handle the increasing demand for avionics support, featuring advanced technology to streamline repair processes and ensure high levels of fleet availability.
Thales’s skilled technicians specialise in maintaining complex avionics systems with repairs that meet stringent safety and regulatory standards.
IndiGo has also extended a 5-year contract with AvioBook, a Thales company, for AvioBook Flight —the only Electronic Flight Bag solution currently authorised for paperless operations by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
In use across the entire IndiGo fleet for over a year, AvioBook Flight has already helped significantly reduce consumption of paper usage annually thereby advancing environmental sustainability goals and streamlining flight operations on over 2,000 flights every day.
AvioBook: Bringing Cockpits Into the Digital Age
AvioBook, part of Thales, is a digital platform that replaces the heavy stacks of paper manuals, charts and logbooks once carried by pilots. Known as an Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), it puts everything crews need for a flight onto a tablet—from flight plans and weather updates to real-time messages from dispatch.
More than 60 airlines worldwide now use AvioBook to manage over 2,600 aircraft and tens of thousands of flights every week. For IndiGo, which operates over 2,000 flights a day, the system has already cut paper use, lowered fuel burn linked to carrying paper on board, and helped crews coordinate more efficiently.
“By the Hour”: Predictable Costs, Reliable Availability
Thales is also recognised for its “By the Hour” maintenance programmes, which give airlines cost stability and higher fleet availability. Instead of unpredictable bills for spares and repairs, models like Avionics-By-the-Hour (ABTH) and Repair-By-the-Hour (RBTH) provide access to critical components and guaranteed turnaround at a usage-based rate.
The approach minimises downtime, simplifies budgeting, and helps airlines scale more efficiently. With its new Gurugram MRO hub, Thales is anchoring this global support capability in India, directly benefiting IndiGo as it prepares to double its fleet in the years ahead.
Parichay Datta, Senior Vice-president, Engineering, IndiGo, stated:
“We are pleased to partner with Thales, a leading aerospace company trusted worldwide for its expertise in avionics support, to augment IndiGo’s maintenance and repairs capabilities. With IndiGo’s growing scale and fleet, this association aligns with our commitment to offer a hassle-free and safe flying experience to our customers, while ensuring operational excellence and reliability.”
Thomas Got, Vice President, Aviation Global Services, Thales, said:
“This strategic partnership with IndiGo underscores our commitment to delivering airline world-class avionics support and services. Our new MRO facility in India increases Thales’s ability to provide a swift, reliable service, backed by the power of our global organisation, to meet the evolving demands of the Indian aviation industry.”
