The festival season has not brought cheer for airlines. Domestic air traffic has come down sharply by over 15 per cent in October.

The overall traffic has also declined during the January-October period, as compared to the year ago period.

According to data submitted by various scheduled airlines, the number of domestic passengers came down to 45.55 lakh in October from over 54 lakh during October 2011. A scheduled domestic airline is defined as an airline which has at least five aircraft and operates a fixed schedule.

During the January-October period, domestic scheduled airlines flew a total of 483.94 lakh passengers. It is nearly 2.47 per cent less than the 496.19 lakh domestic passengers flown during January-October 2011.

In terms of market share, Indigo has maintained its top position with 27.8 per cent followed by the Jet Airways-Jetlite (Jet Konnect) combine with 24.7 per cent. But it is Air India whose share is on the rise for six successive months.

Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh has asked Air India to further improve its passenger load factor and on-time performance while aggressively implementing various customer-friendly initiatives.

As compared to October 2011 also, the market share of Air India has shown considerable improvement, rising from 16.6 per cent to 20.8 per cent. Further, during October 2012 the airline carried 9.49 lakh passengers as compared to 8.98 lakh passengers carried in October 2011.

The passenger load factor of Air India has also improved touching 74.7 per cent in October 2012 from 64.7 per cent in July 2012.

The on-time performance of the airline has also improved during the last three years ranging between 84 per cent and 87 per cent.

>shishir.sinha@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics