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NEW DELHI: Grounded since mid-January, the Boeing 787 Dreamliners of Air India will again take to the skies from Wednesday. The US aircraft major has carried out changes in two of the six Dreamliners and AI will deploy them on domestic flights between the hub Delhi to Bangalore and Kolkata. International flights will start from next Wednesday.

Making this announcement on Tuesday, aviation minister Ajit Singh said Boeing will rectify all the six Dreamliners in AI fleet by the month-end and the airline will get eight more B-787s by this December on which new flights will be launched. "AI will start flights on the Dreamliner to Birmingham, Sydney and Melbourne in August. In October, it will start flights to Italy (Rome and Milan). And, early next year will see flights to Moscow. These flights will be to and from Delhi," Singh said. AI will get compensation from Boeing for the B-787s’ January-May grounding.

The Dreamliners’ return to the sky has given hope to AI as the airline’s turnaround rests mainly on this fuel-efficient plane. "AI’s performance has improved a lot. Revenue in 2012-13 rose 9.6% to Rs 16,130 crore from previous fiscal. Passenger carriage has gone up. Loss in 2012-13 is down by about Rs 2,261 crore from previous fiscal’s loss of Rs 7,560 crore," Singh said.

The minister projected that AI will cut costs by Rs 2,000 crore in the current fiscal. It aims to raise Rs 1,000 crore this fiscal by monetizing assets in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Coimbatore. A new contract with oil PSUs is expected to lead to a saving of Rs 500 crore annually. "In the fiscal 2013-14, losses will fall from Rs 5,198 crore (past fiscal) to Rs 3,989 crore," Singh said.

The airline will now be a ’hybrid’ of both low cost and full service carriers. "We will adopt the best practices of both the models. We are yet to decide what all things should we charge for," CMD of AI Rohit Nandan said.