Aviation slump hits domestic flyers but foreign carriers expand base in India

Mumbai, November 11: After dizzying northward growth — which the country’s aviation sector witnessed before the rise in aviation turbine fuel (ATF) prices— in terms of capacity addition and flight frequencies between major Indian destinations, the country’s domestic carriers have trimmed down the frequency of flights for now and are waiting for the dust to settle down. However, on the other hand, international traffic to and from India’s busiest airport is on the rise and this can be gauged by rising number of frequencies of international flights and their slot allocations. According to the figures obtained from Mumbai International Airport limited (MIAL), the private operator that runs city’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), while number of domestic slots at the airport has remained at 502 this winter schedule, slots for international airlines have seen a rise from 198 slots in the previous summer schedule to 214 slots in the winter schedule.

An airport slot, according to International Airport Transport Association’s (IATA) Worldwide Scheduling Guidelines (WSG), is the scheduled time of arrival or departure available for an aircraft movement on a specific date at a coordinated airport. As per IATA’s WSG guidelines, the Mumbai’s CSIA is a level 3 airport in terms of slot allocations. In CSIA, the demand for slots by airlines exceeds the availability and thereby slots are decided by an independent coordinator, a role played by the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MCA) through its implementing body, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

With domestic carriers cutting down the number of operational flights owing to domestic slump, international carriers are increasingly trying to push their presence in domestic skies and therefore the increase. But to most of them, the demand was always there with the increase in frequency only catering to latent demand.

“For international carriers, the effect of the slump has been a little soft as our business does not depend on point to point operations like the domestic carriers. Instead, we operate on various models like the hub & spoke system where there are several origins and destinations with balanced flow of traffic from both ends,” said a senior international airline executive. Carriers like Qatar and Emirates have already increased their presence in the country by adding more flights. While Emirates added 18 additional flights per week in July this year to various destinations taking its India operations to 132 flights per week, Qatar Airways started daily operations to the United States from nine Indian cities.

... contd.

Ads By Google

Message*	Maximum characters allowed

Name*		Email ID*
Subject*		Country*

TERMS OF USE:
The views, opinions and comments posted are your, and are not endorsed by this website. You shall be solely responsible for the comment posted here. The website reserves the right to delete, reject, or otherwise remove any views, opinions and comments posted or part thereof. You shall ensure that the comment is not inflammatory, abusive, derogatory, defamatory &/or obscene, or contain pornographic matter and/or does not constitute hate mail, or violate privacy of any person (s) or breach confidentiality or otherwise is illegal, immoral or contrary to public policy. Nor should it contain anything infringing copyright &/or intellectual property rights of any person(s).

I agree to the terms of use.