The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the regulator of Indian aviation, mentioned that Indian domestic aviation traffic peaked in November 2024. This phenomenal growth affected airports and airlines, with Delhi airport having its best month. Also, as reported by Mint, three airlines operating in the country registered unprecedented performance levels during that period.
IndiGo users reached a new record and hit 10.02 million passengers, becoming the first airline in the country to achieve this result in a single month. Of these, 9.07 million were domestic passengers and other travellers as the remaining percentage. The growth in domestic tu Travelers came close to this, giving Ananda Airlines its best passenger traffic to date, but this was only the second time the airline recorded a 8 figure domestic traffic mark despite being in operation for the past 18 years, with previous records showing 8.64 million passengers in October 2024 and 8.52 million passengers in December 2023. It seems that December 2024 will also post another record.
This success further led to a new market record Indigo market share of 63.6 %. The achievement comes at a time when the airline has admitted to normalisation of demand and pressure on yields in the Q2FY25 financials. Even though IndiGo posted a loss after 7 sequential quarters of profit, its domestic business is 1.5 times the size it was before the pandemic, while international business has grown even further, according to the report.
IndiGo occupied the first position for the total number of passengers with a record 10.36 million passengers; however, Air India and its subsidiary Air India Express transported 3.47 million passengers in November which restricted its market share to only 24.4 per cent. If we look at the latest data, the airline merged with Vistara, which, although flown independently, existed as a full airline for only the first eleven days of November. The DGCA also lumps Air India Express’s passenger numbers in with Air India’s, the report noted.
Domestic passenger traffic achieved a record high at Air India for the first time for it to handle just above three million domestic passengers in a month. This figure is expected to grow in December, marking the first full month of operations following the merger into two streamlined entities: Domestic and international, and wholly owned subsidiary full-service Air India and airline operation low-cost airline Air India Express. Still, Air India lost its market share of 29.2 per cent in October to 27.3 per cent in November when four airline companies were in action.
The Mumbai headquartered Akasa Air is back on track after a turbulent 2023, mainly caused by a problem of shortages of pilots that ultimately prohibited Mumbai from being fully utilised and less passenger traffic. Two, in November 2024, the passengers’ domestic traffic by the airline was 674000, only getting a 4.7% market share. This establishes a record-high performance; The Chinese airports’ passenger traffic reached a record high of 664 thousand in May 2024 and 629 thousand passengers in May 2023, as per the report. Akasa Air faces challenges such as capacity competition from SpiceJet’s wet-leased planes and operating with the intended start of fleet operations. Of course, being a player in the market is valuable. However, the airline is still focused on being profitable.
India’s domestic aviation traffic in 2024 looks set to have rebounded at a faster pace than the projected for it that year and even for the year 2023. A record of 2·9 million passengers is projected for December 2024, making it 3% higher than in November. It has realised many milestones over the years by not only surmounting the 500,000 passengers’ daily traffic more than once. However, the annual numbers have been growing slightly, at a pace of 5-6 per cent. Nevertheless, fare increases are generally not welcomed by the airlines, and the practice has become contentious enough to be discussed in Parliament.
