Air India is adding Mumbai to its North American map in a big way this winter, launching three weekly flights to Toronto Pearson just as Air Canada's exit left the market wide open. But there's a catch worth knowing before you book: while the Toronto-to-Mumbai leg is nonstop, the westbound journey now stops in Rome, pushing total travel time past 20 hours.

The stop exists because of geography and geopolitics. With Russian, Iranian and Pakistani airspace off-limits, Air India's India–North America flights have to thread a long way around, and the Mumbai–New York JFK and Newark services already refuel and swap crews at Rome Fiumicino. Strong winter headwinds on the westbound run don't help either.

Flights run Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. The Mumbai departure leaves at 12:25 am, reaches Rome at 5:30 am, then continues to Toronto, arriving at 11:00 am the same day. The return leg is simpler: a 1:30 pm departure from Toronto landing in Mumbai at 2:10 pm the next day. Air India is flying its 328-seat Boeing 777-300ER with the refreshed cabin — eight first-class suites with privacy doors, 40 lie-flat business seats, and 280 economy seats in a tight but standard 3-4-3 layout with 31-inch pitch.

The timing isn't random. Air Canada pulled out of Toronto–Mumbai earlier this year after deciding its via-London routing was unsustainable in a post-Russian-airspace world. That left a genuinely large market unserved: booking data shows more than 1.2 million round-trip passengers flew between the two cities in the past year, making Toronto the third-biggest Mumbai–North America market after New York JFK and San Francisco. Air Canada did fly the route nonstop from 2017 to 2020, so the demand clearly predates the current airspace headaches.

It fits into a busy winter for Air India, which is scheduled to operate more than 1,300 flights between India and North America this season, carrying roughly 436,600 round-trip seats. Most of those involve a technical stop somewhere in Europe — only Delhi–San Francisco (up to five weekly) and Delhi–Vancouver (daily) run nonstop this winter, both on the 777-300ER.

For travellers, the practical takeaway is to compare carefully. If you're flying Mumbai to Toronto, the printed schedule includes a Rome stopover, so total block time matters more than the ticket's 'route' listing. Toronto-bound travellers get a nonstop home. Either way, Air India is currently the only realistic nonstop-ish option on a city pair this size, and its Star Alliance status means Air Canada Aeroplan and other Star points can still come into play. Book early for the winter peak — the Indian diaspora traffic on this corridor is heavy around December holidays.

Simple Flying