The situation has become worse from bad for the Indian aviation space if one goes by the data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

India’s air passenger traffic for April fell 4.5 percent on year to 109.95 lakh flyers, thereby registering its sharpest decline in nearly six years. The data indicates the number of passengers flown by various scheduled domestic airlines in a month.

Domestic air passenger volumes, which had been growing at a double-digit rate since September 2014 for 52 months, suddenly witnessed a single-digit rise of 9.1 percent in January, coinciding with Jet Airways’ worsening financial crisis and commander shortage problem at IndiGo.

Further, the 119-plane-strong Jet Airways started grounding its planes by half a dozen every week since February. Safety concerns about Boeing 737 MAX aircraft hit SpiceJet’s operations as with the worldwide ban on the aircraft type, 12 of its planes were also grounded. While the former airline has suspended operations for the interim last month, the latter is adding old planes on lease.

With Jet Airways out of the market, at least for the interim, its slots and aircraft are up for grabs and all its peers are trying to make the most of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

IndiGo, which was already the market leader, has now become the Maruti Suzuki of Indian aviation space with almost 50 percent market share or 49.9 percent to be precise for the month of April as against 46.9 percent in March.

Air India is now the second largest carrier, the title earlier held with Jet Airways, with a market share of 13.9 percent in April as against 13.1 percent in March. SpiceJet, interestingly, lost market share at 13.1 percent for April as against 13.6 percent in March.

GoAir has managed to take its market share to a double-digit figure of 10.8 percent in April as against 9.9 percent in March. Vistara still hasn’t been able to go beyond 5 percent share and is currently at 4.7 percent, while its sister airline AirAsia held 6.2 percent share for April.

Also, the data showed another interesting point. While Jet Airways was operating a fleet of 35 aircraft towards the start of the month and shut operations on April 17, it still was more punctual (85.2 percent ) than Air India (70.7 percent ) and SpiceJet (80.4 percent ). Overall, GoAir was the most punctual airline with an on-time performance of 96.3 percent for four metro airports, followed by AirAsia and Vistara. IndiGo stood fourth with an OTP of 89.9 percent .

Capacity utilisation or passenger load factor for April was the highest for SpiceJet at 93.7 percent. It is the 49th month-in-a-row that it has topped in this parameter. IndiGo was able to utilize 87.8 percent of its capacity in April as against 86 percent in March.

First Published:May 22, 2019 9:13 PM IST