Campbell Wilson, the CEO of Air India, is a New Zealand-born airline executive who took charge of Air India on 25 July 2022, becoming the Tata Group’s first CEO for the carrier after its return to Tata ownership. He spent the previous 25-plus years at Singapore Airlines, including two stints as founding CEO of its budget offshoot Scoot — first from 2011 to 2016, then again from 2020 through his move to Air India.
At Air India (AI), his brief has been a full corporate rebuild: merging four Tata aviation entities (Air India, Vistara, Air India Express, and AIX Connect) into two carriers, placing record-breaking aircraft orders, and retrofitting the widebody fleet. In April 2026, Wilson resigned, agreeing to stay on until the board finds a successor, as losses mounted and the airline continued dealing with the fallout of the Air India Flight 171 crash.
What Wilson Is Actually Paid
Unlike the Gulf carriers further down this page, Air India’s ownership structure means executive pay does get disclosed to the board and reported by Indian financial press — so the numbers below aren’t estimates pieced together from analyst guesswork.
Air India’s board approved a new remuneration package for Wilson that took effect April 1, 2025, raising his total pay to ₹27.75 crore (roughly $3.3 million), a 46% jump from the ₹18.98 crore he was paid in FY 2023-24, according to Business Standard’s reporting, which cited Mint. The package breaks down as:
- Fixed salary: ₹11.1 crore
- Performance-linked bonus: ₹8.32 crore
- Long-term stock incentives: ₹8.32 crore
That structure means roughly 60% of his current pay is tied to Air India’s operating and financial performance rather than guaranteed. The board’s own filing described the package as in line with what expatriate CEOs at similarly sized multinationals receive, given the responsibilities of the role.
The uncomfortable detail that most coverage leads with: the raise was approved on May 27, 2025 — roughly two weeks before Air India Flight 171 crashed on 12 June 2025, a disaster that killed over 270 people and became one of the deadliest civil aviation accidents India has seen in three decades. Bookings fell an estimated 20% and fares dropped 8-15% in the weeks after, per industry association data cited in the same reporting.
Cambell Wilson’s Pay Trajectory: 2022 to 2026
Wilson’s compensation has climbed steadily since he joined:
| Period | Total annual pay |
|---|---|
| 2022 (joining salary) | ~₹8.5 crore (~$1M base, plus incentive potential) |
| FY 2023-24 | ₹18.98 crore |
| FY 2025-26 (effective) | ₹27.75 crore (~$3.3M) |
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How Wilson’s Pay Compares to Other Indian Airline Chiefs
The clearest apples-to-apples comparison sits within India itself. For the same FY2024 period referenced above:
- IndiGo’s Pieter Elbers earned ₹21.61 crore, according to Storyboard18 — putting him below Wilson’s revised figure despite IndiGo carrying more domestic passengers than any other Indian airline.
- Akasa Air’s Vinay Dube was paid ₹8.75 crore in the same year.
- SpiceJet’s Ajay Singh received ₹5.4 crore.
Wilson’s post-raise pay therefore sits at the top of the Indian airline executive pay table — a gap the board’s own disclosure attributes to the scale of the Tata Group turnaround Wilson has been running rather than to operational performance alone.
One regional comparison that doesn’t hold up on scrutiny: SriLankan Airlines. It’s wholly state-owned, and unlike Air India — where board-approved figures reach the press — SriLankan Airlines has not published a specific CEO compensation figure in its public disclosures or Right to Information filings. Any precise number attached to its leadership’s pay should be treated the same way as unverified Gulf-carrier estimates: not traceable to a filing.
How Wilson Stacks Up Against Global Airline-Group CEOs
Widen the lens beyond South Asia, and the comparison gets more interesting — because most of the world’s major carriers either don’t disclose pay at all or disclose it at the group level rather than for a single national airline.
- Lufthansa Group’s Carsten Spohr had his most recently disclosed total pay put at roughly €8.83 million (about $9.6M), compiled from S&P Global filings, against a hard legal cap of €11 million set under German corporate law — full detail in this breakdown of Spohr’s pay structure. Unlike Wilson, Spohr runs a multi-airline holding company (Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings), so his number reflects a bigger, group-wide remit.
- Air France’s Anne Rigail, by contrast, doesn’t have a separately disclosed total pay figure at all — her compensation is folded into the parent Air France-KLM group filing, where group CEO Benjamin Smith’s pay was most recently reported around €5.1 million. The mechanics of that disclosure gap are covered in this look at Rigail’s role and pay.
- Emirates’ Tim Clark has no verifiable salary figure whatsoever — Emirates is wholly owned by the Dubai government’s Investment Corporation of Dubai, with no shareholder AGM or statutory pay disclosure. Every AED or USD figure attached to his name online is an outside estimate, not a filing — as explained in this examination of why Clark’s pay isn’t public.
Set against that spread, Wilson’s position is unusual: Air India is privately held by Tata Sons, yet its board-approved executive pay still surfaces in Indian financial media in a way Emirates’ or SriLankan’s never does. That makes Wilson one of the few non-listed-carrier CEOs anywhere in the world whose real compensation figure is publicly traceable.
What Air India Is Prioritizing Through the Leadership Transition
Wilson’s remaining months in the role are focused on finishing what his contract’s incentive structure was built to reward:
- Completing the Vistara and AIX Connect integration into Air India and Air India Express respectively
- Wide-body cabin retrofits across the Boeing 777 and 787 fleet
- Continued fleet delivery, against a backdrop of persistent Boeing and Airbus supply delays
- Safety and regulatory response following the AI171 crash investigation
- Managing losses that reporting has pegged as high as ₹20,000 crore for FY2026, amid West Asia airspace disruption and elevated fuel and insurance costs
Bottom Line
Campbell Wilson’s confirmed total pay is ₹27.75 crore (~$3.3 million), effective April 1, 2025 — a disclosed, board-approved figure, not an estimate, made up of ₹11.1 crore fixed salary plus ₹16.64 crore in performance bonus and long-term incentives combined. It’s the highest confirmed CEO pay among Indian carriers, ahead of IndiGo’s Pieter Elbers, and it places him in rare company globally: one of the only airline CEOs at a privately held carrier whose real number is publicly known, at a moment when peers running Gulf carriers like Emirates have no disclosed figure at all.
FAQs
What is Campbell Wilson’s confirmed 2026 salary?
₹27.75 crore (~$3.3 million) annually, effective April 1, 2025, per Air India board disclosures reported by Business Standard and Storyboard18.
How much of his pay is performance-linked?
About 60% — his ₹8.32 crore bonus and ₹8.32 crore long-term incentives are tied to Air India’s operating and financial results, against a ₹11.1 crore fixed base.
How does his pay compare to IndiGo’s CEO?
Higher. Pieter Elbers was paid ₹21.61 crore in the same comparison period, roughly ₹6 crore less than Wilson’s revised package.
Is Wilson still CEO of Air India? He resigned in April 2026 but is staying on until the board appoints a successor, continuing to lead the airline through its transition period.