The six months from October 2024 to March 2025 is likely to see the two largest cities in India get one new airport each. The Jewar airport is slated to open in 2024 near Greater NOIDA and the Navi Mumbai Airport. While there remains no clear data on its implications on the aviation industry, this post will share a few hypotheses and ask some pertinent questions on how the airline networks will evolve.
Expansion of Mumbai’s connectivity
The current Mumbai airport (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport) is severely capacity constrained. Mumbai is well connected with high frequencies to the metro cities – 171 departures or 50% of all daily flights from Mumbai go to one of the other 7 metro cities. (Counting Ahmedabad and Pune in this list). In contrast that figure for Delhi is 200 departures or 43% of total departures. As a corollary, Mumbai is poorly connected to the rest of India with lower destinations and frequencies than say Delhi or Bangalore. There are very few flights to and from Mumbai to its hinterland (rest of Maharashtra, smaller cities of Gujarat, North and Coastal Karnataka & Madhya Pradesh) given the runway constraints at BOM airport. This constraint as also the frequency constraint of slot usage at BOM will go away with the Navi Mumbai airport. One prediction this blog can safely make is that Mumbai – as a city will be better connected to more destinations and with greater frequencies than before
Network expansion of LCCs
The creation of these two airports will fuel the likely expansion of Akasa Air, Alliance Air, Indigo and Air India Express networks from both these cities to new markets hitherto untapped from the Delhi or Mumbai metropolitan areas. Routes like Jewar to Bikaner or Navi Mumbai to Nanded will support the government’s UDAN initiative and allow for greater domestic connectivity, connecting more of India’s hinterland to its gateways to the world. Indeed you could see the birth of new regional carriers as they leverage the capacity made available. Sticking our neck out, Indigo could possibly expand to more smaller airports in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra (like Bikaner, Kishangarh, Sindhudurg, Bhavnagar, Porbandar, Kandla, Nanded) with their right sized ATR fleet
Growth in cargo and trans-shipment hubs
Given the sizeable catchment with a sizeable GDP of the addressable market, as well as the close port connectivity that Navi Mumbai airport will enjoy, we should hopefully see explosive cargo growth in both Jewar and Navi Mumbai
Key unanswered questions
Will these airports cannibalise the existing traffic or add to the overall pie – While Indira Gandhi airport at Delhi still has sizeable growth left with its 4th runway and new terminal 1 coming on stream (targeting an ambition of 100 Mn passengers), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai is already restricted in terms of new slots available. In this context, it is likely that the Navi Mumbai airport expands the overall market of Mumbai (rather like Goa Manohar airport at Mopa has done for the Goa market), with some catchment addition from Pune (to which this airport will be closer than the current Mumbai airport and which is severely capacity constrained). Jewar on the other hand remains a puzzle though Indigo has committed to be the launch airline at that airport which is a big vote of confidence. Akasa Air has also signed up for the Jewar airport recently. In the long term, given the economic growth and the massive catchment available to both airports, it is likely that they cannibalise little and indeed add much needed extra capacity as has happened with Goa, which in turn creates new opportunities for airlines and drives traffic upwards.
What will be the impact of both of these airports to India’s hub aspirations – here lies a paradox. While the infrastructure built at both new airports will be better suited to the stated ambitions of the government to build hubs in India to carry traffic from beyond countries, the leading airlines Air India and Indigo have built a dense network at Delhi facilitating a large amount of domestic to domestic and domestic to international transfers. This number was 22% of all passenger footfall at Delhi airport in FY23. Similar data for Mumbai is not available but is likely to be smaller given the constraints. There is a clear opportunity with the higher unconstrained capacity available at the two new airports to design hubs from scratch. For instance, given Mumbai’s proximity, historical links and connectivity with the Middle East region, can an Indian carrier build at Navi Mumbai a hub that channels domestic and other international passengers to the Middle East and vice versa. Will these and other opportunities like these be taken up by the big two players or by others is something we will wait to see
What will be the spillover impact on other airports in the country – for a long time, since both Delhi and Mumbai were capacity constrained, airlines like Indigo with growing fleets, expanded their network to other markets with particular focus on Bangalore and (more recently) Hyderabad. While these are prosperous high growth cities, they will now be competing with greenfield airports with no capacity constraints and with huge catchments in their own right (Navi Mumbai can also attract incremental traffic from Pune and likewise Jewar from the entire western UP belt). How this dynamic plays out will be interesting to watch – particularly since Indian carriers have committed to large fleet orders which need to be profitably placed. Two straws in the wind – the first is with the collapse of Go air, Indigo, Akasa and Air India group added significant incremental capacity at Mumbai and Delhi to not just match but actually exceed the departures offered by Go air showing the latent opportunity. Similarly, with the Indigo groundings starting January 2024, it is striking that no capacity was reduced at either Delhi or Mumbai airports. We need to watch for this summer where more capacity gets unlocked at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi airport. What will be the impact of that capacity addition on other airports and key routes will be something to read into
Will airlines split operations or move lock-stock-and barrel: current connectivity from South and Suburban Mumbai to the current airport is likely superior to that which will be offered by the Navi Mumbai airport though that will change with infrastructure addition. Similarly for West and South Delhi and Gurugram, the current Delhi airport is better connected than Jewar will be. All these dictate the addressable market which is likely (initially) to be larger for the existing airports. Both large airlines also run extensive transfer operations of international passengers (including those on other international carriers through codeshares) to domestic networks and vice versa. It’s quite unlikely therefore in the view of this blogger that either large airline group will move its operations exclusively to the new airports. Instead we could see a split of operations. It is smaller operators at these metro airports (e.g. Akasa and possibly Air India express) that could significantly benefit from the new capacity available that could choose to preferentially expand at Navi Mumbai and Jewar to better take on Indigo.
The next 12 to 24 months in Indian aviation promise to be very interesting, both with large capacity additions by the existing carriers and the evolution of airline networks factoring in these 2 new airports.
About the author: This guest contributor is an aviation enthusiast whose day job is in consumer goods. A frequent flyer (1300 + flights logged) and a data geek with a love for analysing airline networks and their evolution. On X (Formerly Twitter) and other platforms as @BOMLHR
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This is forward thinking article , just that we all have been waiting to read , to imagine as no one knows what will happen in future. Amey your article sets direction for our thoughts. Best wishes & may it be so
Very well balanced article on possible outcomes. I’ll follow this guest contributor on X.