IndiGo's Walsh Confirms Embraer, ATR Fleet Talks

A new CEO stakes out his agenda

Willie Walsh, the former IAG chief and International Air Transport Association (IATA) director general who took over as IndiGo's chief executive from Pieter Elbers last month, used the 2026 Skytrax World Airline Awards in London on September 18 to lay out, in public, for the first time, two pieces of strategy he intends to pursue: a renewal of IndiGo's regional turboprop fleet, and an attempt to build New Delhi into an international connecting hub that can compete directly with the Gulf's big three carriers — Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad.

Both threads were reported first by Bloomberg on September 18, and picked up over the following two days by BusinessToday, Air Data News, Aviacionline and other trade outlets. IndiGo itself has confirmed that talks are underway with Embraer and ATR, though the airline has been careful to describe those discussions as early-stage, with no fixed aircraft count and no signed contract.

This is a distinct, dated development from Walsh's arrival as CEO in August — it is the first time he has put concrete numbers and named manufacturers to what he intends to do with the fleet and the network, rather than simply describing his priorities in the abstract.

What's on the table with Embraer and ATR

According to Bloomberg's reporting, IndiGo is in talks with both Embraer SA, the Brazilian planemaker, and ATR, the Franco-Italian turboprop manufacturer jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, over an order for regional aircraft. The talks are early enough that neither the number of aircraft nor a firm contract has been settled, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

IndiGo currently operates around 40 ATR 72-600 turboprops on regional and feeder routes — down from roughly 46 as of March 2026, according to fleet data compiled by Air Data News and Wikipedia's IndiGo fleet tracking page. The aircraft under consideration would either supplement or outright replace that turboprop fleet.

Two aircraft families are reportedly in the mix on the Embraer side: the smaller E190-E2 and the larger E195-E2, both part of Embraer's second-generation E-Jet family. ATR's current offering tops out with the ATR 72-600. Air Data News reported that a deal, if it proceeds anywhere near the scale discussed, could be worth billions of dollars before the customary volume discounts airlines negotiate on large orders — and would be Embraer's biggest single order in the Indian market to date if it materializes with the Brazilian manufacturer.

It's worth being explicit about what remains unconfirmed: there is no signed memorandum of understanding, no announced aircraft count, and no timeline for a decision. Airlines routinely run parallel talks with competing manufacturers to extract better terms, and it is common for such "in talks" stories to either result in a scaled-down order, a split order between manufacturers, or no order at all. IndiGo has not said when it expects to decide.

The Delhi hub ambition

The regional fleet talk is only half of what Walsh described in London. The more sweeping claim is about Delhi. Walsh said he wants to develop Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport into a hub capable of capturing international connecting traffic that currently flows through Gulf hubs like Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi — traffic generated by passengers originating in India (and, potentially, further afield in South Asia) who today connect onward to Europe, North America and beyond via a Gulf carrier rather than staying on an Indian-flagged itinerary.

The hub push rests heavily on IndiGo's widebody order book. The airline has 60 Airbus A350-900s on firm order, with first deliveries expected between 2027 and 2028. "Given the number of aircraft we have and the 60 A350s we are going to receive, we will obviously look at many new markets where we currently do not operate," Walsh said at the Skytrax event, according to Bloomberg's account.

The logic Walsh is describing is a standard hub-and-spoke play: use the renewed regional/turboprop network to feed narrowbody and eventually widebody long-haul flights out of a single, well-timed hub, so that a passenger flying from a smaller Indian city to, say, London or New York stays on IndiGo (and its codeshare/interline partners) for the whole journey instead of connecting through Dubai or Doha on Emirates or Qatar Airways. Delhi, as India's largest international gateway by traffic and the site of ongoing capacity expansion work, is the airport IndiGo has picked to run that model through.

Why this matters for the Gulf carriers

IndiGo's regional turboprop fleet size versus its firm A350-900 widebody order, the two aircraft counts anchoring its Delhi hub plan

If IndiGo executes on both pieces — a renewed and possibly larger regional feeder fleet, plus a widebody long-haul fleet arriving from 2027 — it would mark IndiGo's most direct attempt yet to compete for the specific pool of connecting traffic that has underpinned the growth of Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad over the past two decades: passengers who are not flying to or from the Gulf itself, but are using a Gulf hub purely as a connection point between South Asia and the rest of the world.

That is a different competitive question than IndiGo's existing rivalry with the Gulf carriers on point-to-point India-Gulf routes, where IndiGo already competes on price with its A321LR/XLR narrowbody fleet. A genuine hub strategy, by contrast, requires enough widebody capacity, enough connecting-friendly schedule banking at Delhi, and enough long-haul destinations to make a one-stop-via-Delhi itinerary competitive on both price and convenience with a one-stop-via-Dubai itinerary. IndiGo has historically been a low-cost, narrowbody-first carrier; the 60-aircraft A350 order was itself a major strategic pivot when it was placed, and its delivery schedule starting in 2027 is the first point at which Walsh's Delhi ambitions become operationally testable.

Reading the regional order against IndiGo's history

IndiGo's relationship with turboprops has been uneasy for years. The airline brought ATR 72-600s into its fleet in 2017 to serve smaller airports under India's regional connectivity scheme (UDAN) and other thin routes that narrowbody jets could not serve economically. But turboprops have never sat comfortably with IndiGo's low-cost, single-fleet-type philosophy, which for most of its history relied almost entirely on the Airbus A320 family for commonality of maintenance, crew training and spares. Reports of IndiGo considering a swap away from ATR are not new — Business Standard reported as early as August that IndiGo was in early discussions with Embraer over a large regional jet order — but Walsh's on-record comments in London are the first time a sitting CEO has put the two manufacturers, ATR and Embraer, side by side as live options rather than speculation.

The distinction between an ATR turboprop and an Embraer E-Jet matters operationally. A turboprop trades speed for lower fuel burn and better short-runway performance, which suits India's regional airports; a regional jet like the E190-E2 or E195-E2 is faster and more comfortable on medium-length routes but burns more fuel and needs longer runways. If IndiGo ultimately leans toward Embraer, it would represent a meaningful shift in how the airline thinks about its below-A320 segment — treating those routes more like short-haul jet flying that can also feed a hub, rather than pure regional-connectivity flying that stands apart from the main network.

Context: a new CEO moving quickly

Walsh's public remarks come only weeks into his tenure. He joined IndiGo from IATA, where he served as director general, and before that ran International Airlines Group (IAG), the parent of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus and Vueling, for a decade. His appointment was seen in the industry as a signal that IndiGo — India's largest airline by domestic market share — intends to professionalize and internationalize its operations as it builds out long-haul flying.

The Embraer/ATR talks and the Delhi hub comments are the first substantive strategic signals from Walsh since he took the CEO role, and they came at an international industry event (the Skytrax World Airline Awards) rather than through a formal IndiGo investor or press release, which is part of why outlets have been careful to frame the regional-aircraft story as "talks" and "early-stage" rather than a confirmed order.

What to watch next

Several concrete milestones will indicate whether this moves from stated ambition to executed strategy: whether IndiGo signs a memorandum of understanding or firm order with Embraer, ATR, or both, and for how many aircraft; whether the airline announces new long-haul route launches timed to the 2027-2028 A350 delivery window; and whether Delhi's airport infrastructure — including ongoing terminal and runway capacity projects — keeps pace with the connecting-traffic volumes a genuine hub strategy would require. None of those have been confirmed or scheduled as of this writing.

IndiGo has not issued its own detailed statement beyond confirming that talks with Embraer and ATR are taking place; the airline has not published aircraft counts, order values, or a decision timeline. This article will need to be updated once any of those specifics are confirmed.

IndiGo's Walsh Confirms Embraer and ATR Talks as He Bets on Delhi as a Gulf-Rivalling Hub