Air India named a chief executive on 5 August and could not say when he would start. A company that can announce a leader but not install one is a fair introduction to the job on offer.
The man is Tewolde Gebremariam, who ran Ethiopian Airlines Group for eleven years and has never worked for an Indian company. Air India’s board looked at internal and external candidates, and Reuters had reported in July that the front runners were the airline’s own chief commercial officer Nipun Aggarwal and the Singapore Airlines executive Vinod Kannan. Singapore Airlines owns 25.1% of Air India. Neither man got it.
The record Air India is buying
Gebremariam joined Ethiopian Airlines in 1985 and spent part of the 1990s in Mumbai as its regional director for India and Southeast Asia. He became group chief executive in 2011. By his former employer’s account, revenue more than quadrupled to around $4.5 billion and the fleet nearly tripled. Those figures come from Ethiopian Airlines, not from an independent audit, and should be read as a company’s version of its own decade.
Two things sit inside that record. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, came down six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa on 10 March 2019, killing all 157 people aboard. Boeing later accepted responsibility and the MAX was grounded worldwide for twenty months. Sanjay Lazar, chief executive of Avialaz Consultants, told the BBC that Gebremariam “endeared himself to his employees during both these black swan events, especially his backing of the pilots and engineers at Ethiopian.”
The second thing is why he stopped. He requested early retirement in March 2022 after six months of medical treatment in the United States, because the role, in his board’s words, “demands closer presence and full attention round the clock.” Neither Air India’s announcement nor Tata’s mentions this. Both describe his tenure entirely in growth multiples.
The airline he has agreed to run
Air India’s losses more than doubled to ₹22,238 crore in FY26, from ₹10,859 crore the year before. N. Chandrasekaran said the turnaround, planned as a five-year programme under the Vihaan.AI strategy, could now run to a decade.
The investigation into Air India Flight 171 is still open. The Boeing 787-8 came down shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025, killing 260 people including nineteen on the ground. The AAIB’s preliminary report found both engine fuel-control switches had moved from run to cutoff a second apart. Why they moved has not been established and there is no date for a final report.
Campbell Wilson’s own exit was presented as a decision taken in 2024. Reuters, the BBC and CNBC all tied its timing to the losses and to the regulatory scrutiny that followed the crash. He steps down on 30 September.
The case against
The independent analyst John Strickland gave the argument for the hire, and accidentally gave the argument against it in the same breath. “It takes someone with a particular set of skills and experience to navigate such a complex situation,” he told Reuters, before adding: “It’s not going to be some overnight sensation that suddenly changes because there’s a new boss.”
Kapil Kaul, who runs the aviation advisory CAPA India, called the choice “an interesting choice, but an excellent one,” and credited Gebremariam with making Ethiopian “what many call the Emirates of Africa.” His verdict on what follows was four words long: “It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick.” CNBC-TV18, reporting him, framed the real question precisely: not whether he succeeded in Ethiopia, but whether that playbook can be adapted to India. Ethiopian built its network on connecting African traffic through a hub it effectively owned. Air India is fighting IndiGo at home, Akasa underneath it, and the Gulf carriers for the same long-haul passengers it needs to win back.
There is one more complication, and it arrived a week later. The chairman who signed off on this hire, and whose name is on the quote welcoming him, told the Tata Sons board on 12 August that he will not seek reappointment. Gebremariam has been recruited by a man who will be gone by February 2027, into a job with no start date, at an airline whose central problem is that passengers no longer assume it is safe.
Sources
- Reuters, on the appointment and the John Strickland quotes, 5 August 2026
- Reuters, on the challenges facing the new chief executive, 6 August 2026
- CNBC-TV18, quoting Kapil Kaul of CAPA India, 6 August 2026
- The Hindu, on the FY26 loss and the extended turnaround deadline
- The Indian Express, on Air India’s losses inside Tata Sons’ FY26 results, 27 July 2026
- The Hindu BusinessLine, on the appointment amid turnaround and regulatory pressure
- The Straits Times, carrying Reuters copy and the Singapore Airlines shareholding
- BBC, on the preliminary report’s fuel-switch finding and the questions still open a year on, 15 June 2026
- Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, the Indian investigating authority for Flight 171, official site
- Leaders to Watch, on N. Chandrasekaran’s exit from Tata Sons
