Red eye domestic flights : a niche or opportunity?

Most domestic flights are day time operations designed to offer comfort and convenience to the traveller as well as to meet the needs of corporate travellers looking for a day return trip. Two decades ago, there were virtually no red eye flights barring a few Air India connectors on legs like Mumbai to Delhi. Then Jet airways in the early 2000s started introducing a few select red eye flights which were offered at lower prices to incentivise travel and then built up a sizable red eye bank in Mumbai to support its international network of wide body operations. There have been instances where airlines have operated red eye flights due to lack of night parking. Since then, a number of airlines, in particular Indigo, have built a network of red eye operations out of the big cities in India. For the purpose of this post, a red eye flight is one that is timed for departure between 2300 and 0459 Indian time.

Red eye flights offer both challenges and benefits

1. For the airline, it increases fleet utilisation hours and hence sweat a heavy capital asset (the plane) better. Most Indian carriers do that in any case by operating regional services to the Middle East or South East Asia overnight.
2. It can improve connectivity in the wider network and allow for greater transfers of international to domestic (eg London to Pune via Delhi) and domestic to domestic (Madurai to Mumbai via Chennai) passenger flows
3. It allows airlines to rotate and swap aircraft across bases for maintenance reasons
4. For the airport, it is an excellent way of increasing passenger flows, particularly if there are runway or terminal constraints in the day time. In particular for capacity constrained airports like Mumbai and Pune, these night time operations are vital for maintaining a good frequency of connectivity. However not all airports have the infrastructure to support 24*7 services
5. For the passenger, red eye flights offer greater choice and flexibility with the attraction of avoiding peak hour traffic at the origin and destination. However there is the element of sacrifice of a nights sleep
6. However red eye operations are more expensive in terms of crew hours used (there are restrictions that have become more stringent recently with the new guidelines) and it all boils down to unit cost vs unit profit generated

Let’s study the red eye domestic departures at India’s top 9 destinations

Data for 3^rd week march (15^th March taken as median date) for top 6 carriers at 10 airports (including both Goa airports). Tata group group includes Air India, Vistara and Air India Express

Indigo has the largest red eye departure schedule followed by the Air India group. In the case of Pune which has the busiest red eye departure schedule relative to its total operations, this is understandable given the significant runway availability constraints (Pune being a shared airport with Military use), where night time departures are a necessity for maintaining connectivity. Indeed 40 of the 132 red eye flights (30%) have Pune as either origin or destination.

In the case of Delhi and Mumbai, Indigo and Air India group have built a bank of early morning departures, possibly targeting passengers transiting from their or their partner airline’s international arrivals (both codeshare with a number of international carriers whose arrivals into India are typically at night). Vistara offers a very small set of red eye departures but has just started one in early February on the key Delhi Mumbai sector. 

Future direction

In general, as India moves towards more airports with more runway capacity, we believe that the case for red eye flights will diminish. Barring a few capacity constrained airports like Pune, it doesn’t look like there is strong passenger preference for these flights or that they are lucrative to operate. Further, the new crew rest and duty time guidelines will be a greater constraint post their June 1 implementation and will demand more crew for a red eye flight schedule. Given the market preference for overnight flights on more lucrative international routes to the Middle East and SouthEast Asia, it is likely that airlines will maximise those routes to increase their utilisation hours of their fleet. There will however be a niche role to offer better connectivity to the ever growing international operations of Indian carriers. It is striking that newer airports like Goa Manohar have very few red eye departures and even in airports like Bengaluru and Hyderabad which have few capacity constraints, the red eye departures are largely within the metro sectors and in particular to Pune. With more runway capacity available shortly in the Mumbai region and the Delhi region with the opening of the new green field airports, it is unlikely that red eye flights will be a key driver of revenue or growth in the near future. 

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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