Karachi to Bombay, 1932.

Air India began as a department of a family company. In April 1932 Tata Sons, led by the aviator J. R. D. Tata, won a contract to carry mail for Imperial Airways, and its new aviation department started with two single-engine de Havilland Puss Moths, according to Wikipedia. On 15 October 1932 Tata flew a Puss Moth carrying air mail from Karachi to Bombay, and the aircraft continued to Madras with Nevill Vintcent, a former Royal Air Force pilot, at the controls. The service traded as Tata Airlines.

The name Air India arrived after the Second World War. On 29 July 1946 Tata Airlines became a public limited company under the name Air India, Wikipedia says. After independence the Government of India acquired a large minority stake in 1948, and on 8 June that year a Lockheed Constellation named Malabar Princess left Bombay for London on the airline’s first international service.

The state took control in 1953. That year the government passed the Air Corporations Act and bought a majority stake from Tata Sons, Wikipedia says; the company was renamed Air India International and its domestic services went to a new carrier, Indian Airlines. J. R. D. Tata stayed on as chairman until 1977. The two state airlines ran side by side for decades and were merged in 2007.

Aircraft names were part of the brand from early on. Wikipedia lists a Constellation called Rani of Jhansi, a Boeing 707 called Gauri Shankar delivered on 21 February 1960, and a Boeing 747 called Emperor Ashoka delivered in 1971. The airline’s aircraft were named after Indian kings and landmarks, so each tail carried a small piece of history as well as the company name.

A Maharajah, a centaur and a swan.

The airline’s best-known character is older than its nationalisation. The Maharajah mascot was created in 1946 by Bobby Kooka, then Air India’s commercial director, and Umesh Rao, an artist at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, according to Wikipedia. He was first drawn for the airline’s memo pads and was soon used in its promotion. Kooka explained that the figure was called a Maharajah for want of a better description: he might look like royalty, Kooka said, but he was not royal.

The mascot has been redrawn more than once. Wikipedia says he was given a makeover in 2015, when a younger version took over, and a further makeover in 2023, after which his use was limited to areas such as premium lounges and crockery.

The first logo was chosen by J. R. D. Tata and introduced in 1948: a centaur, a stylised Sagittarius shooting an arrow, set in a circle representing the wheel of Konark. It served until 2007, Wikipedia says. On 22 May 2007, as Air India and Indian Airlines came together, the airlines unveiled a flying swan with the Konark wheel set inside it; the swan was morphed from the centaur, and the wheel came from Indian Airlines’ previous mark.

The livery built its own vocabulary. Air India’s scheme was red and white, with red palace-style carvings painted around the cabin windows to match the slogan “Your Palace in the Sky”, Wikipedia says. The name appeared in Hindi and English, with the two scripts swapped between the fuselage and the tail on each side of the aircraft. In 1971 the first Boeing 747 brought a Palace in the Sky livery, and in 1989 a further livery added a metallic gold spinning wheel on a deep red tail, first painted on a 747 named Rajendra Chola.

Art was part of the house style too. Wikipedia says Air India built a collection of Indian art from 1956, hanging works in its booking offices around the world and using them in promotional material, and that in 1967 it commissioned ashtrays from Salvador Dalí.

Airline symbols, mascots and liveries.

Airline identities work on a scale few other brands face. A mark has to read on a tail fin seen from a terminal window, on a boarding pass, on a seat-back headrest and on a phone screen, and it has to do so in many languages at once. Carriers often lean on a single strong symbol rather than a wordmark alone.

National symbols are a common answer. Flowers, birds, kites, animals and stylised suns or stars appear on tails because they can be drawn simply, coloured boldly and recognised without reading a word. A symbol of this kind also lets an airline speak for a place, which matters when the carrier is, or once was, a state enterprise.

Mascots form a second tradition. A painted character can travel across posters, menus and advertising for decades, and can be retired, revived or redrawn as tastes change.

Livery refreshes tend to arrive with change of ownership, new aircraft types or a merger. Privatisation in particular often brings a renaming, a new typeface and a reworked tail, while the core symbol is kept so that travellers still recognise the brand at the gate.

Back to Tata, and “The Vista”.

The airline returned to its founding group in the 2020s. On 8 October 2021 the government agreed to sell Air India, along with its low-cost arm Air India Express, to the Tata Group, and the airline was formally handed over on 27 January 2022, according to Wikipedia. Tata has owned it since 2022, with Singapore Airlines holding a minority stake after the merger with Vistara, which Wikipedia says was completed in November 2024. Air India is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana.

A new identity followed within two years. On 10 August 2023 Air India unveiled a new logo and livery as part of the Tata Group’s rebranding of the airline, Outlook Business reported that day. The airline said the new logo, called “The Vista”, drew on the peak of a gold window frame and stood for a “window of possibilities”. Aircraft were to carry a palette of deep red, aubergine and gold highlights with a chakra-inspired pattern, and the identity included a custom typeface called Air India Sans. Outlook Business reported that the rebrand was carried out with the London-based agency FutureBrand.

On 11 August 2023, Capital FM reported that the airline had worked on the logo for some 15 months and that it would replace the red swan with orange spokes inspired by the Ashoka Chakra. The window shape, it said, came from the classic Indian window that Air India had used historically, the same arches that once framed the palace-style windows on its aircraft. Travellers would see the new logo from December 2023, when the first Airbus A350 joined the fleet in the new livery, Capital FM reported. Wikipedia describes the window as a jharokha and says new crew uniforms were unveiled in December 2023 alongside the first re-branded A350.

The merger with Vistara added one more renaming. Wikipedia says the two airlines’ loyalty schemes, Flying Returns and Club Vistara, were combined and rebranded as Maharaja Club, so the 1946 mascot’s name lives on even where the figure himself is used more sparingly.

For a design guide, Air India shows how an airline can keep a window, a wheel and a mascot in play across nearly a century of owners and logos. Compare Singapore Airlines, its minority shareholder, and Thai Airways, another Asian flag carrier with a national symbol on the tail. For this guide we use deep red, aubergine and gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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