DOMESTIC AIR TRAFFIC SEES GRADUAL RISE
MUMBAI: While reeling from the effect of the lockdown, domestic air travel has seen a month-onmonth increase in passengers since October 2020. According to the January traffic report released by civil aviation regulator Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Thursday, 7.7 million passengers flew last month to destinations across the country.
With the lockdown, India’s domestic passenger traffic slipped to a seven-year low in 2020. After commercial passenger flights resumed operations with restricted capacity on local routes, traffic increased from 45% between June and September 2020 to 80% in October 2020. DGCA’S report shows the number of fliers increased from 5.2 million in October 2020 to 7.3 million in December 2020.
However, the impact of Covid-19 continues on domestic air travel, with DGCA pegging the sector’s annual growth at -39.60%. Compared to January 2020, when there were 12.7 million passengers, this January, it dipped to 7.7 million.
According to DGCA, the load factor of Indigo, Spicejet, Goair, Air India, Vistara and Airasia India was between 70% and 64.9% in January. Indigo flew the maximum number of passengers (4.2 million) followed by Vistara (0.9 million). Indigo also recorded the highest on-time performance (OTP) in January with an average 93.7% of its flights from four metro airports (Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad). Indigo was followed by Vistara and Air Asia.
CS Subbiah, former CEO or Alliance Air, said domestic air traffic would struggle to reach pre-covid levels so long as travel restrictions remained. He pointed out that the international component in domestic air travel accounts for approximately 20%, with passengers flying into Mumbai or Delhi from abroad and then proceeding to local destinations. “Currently we are operating a maximum of 100 flights under the government’s scheme, which is way below original international flight numbers,” he said.
Subbiah said he expected the demand for air travel to remain poor this year. “Only around October, when the vaccination drive would have reached around 40%, and when international travel would have slowly resumed along with overall relaxed rules that traffic might touch pre-covid levels. However, yields will remain poor. They will start getting better only by summer 2022,” he said.