Domestic Air Traffic Hits Record Growth In H1 2024

India's domestic airlines carried 7.93 crore passengers in the first half yearly(H1) from January to June 2024, reflecting a 4.28 per cent annual growth compared to 7.61 crore passengers in the same period of last year. While air passenger traffic grew 5.76 per cent to 1.32 crore in June from 1.24 crore in the same month of the previous year.

Aviation regulator DGCA's monthly data for June, released on Tuesday, showed that IndiGo carried 80.86 lakh passengers, followed by Tata Group-run Air India and Vistara, which flew 17.47 lakh and 12.84 lakh travellers, respectively. AIX Connect (erstwhile AirAsia India),a part of the Tata Group, carried 7.70 lakh passengers in the previous month.

Market share wise Indigo clocked a market share of 60.5 per cent, Air India at 13.1 per cent, Vistara at 9.6 per cent, and AIX Connect registered a market share of 5.8 per cent. All three Tata Group airlines together accounted for 28.5 per cent of the total domestic passenger traffic last month.

Akasa Air delivered the highest on-time performance (OTP) from the four metro airports -Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad - at 79.5 per cent during June 2024, while SpiceJet recorded the lowest OTP at 46.1 per cent among seven major airlines of the country, reported DGCA.

The DGCA report added that the overall cancellation rate for scheduled domestic airlines in May 2024 was 1.70 per cent. The primary reason for these cancellations was adverse weather conditions, which accounted for 39.6 per cent of the total cancellations. Operational reasons made up 23 per cent, miscellaneous reasons 19.5 per cent, technical issues 16.4 per cent, and commercial reasons 1.3 per cent.