April saw Vistara being impacted by crewing issues, in May it was the turn of another Tata airline, Air India Express which saw its crew reporting sick. This was followed by the new rostering software creating issues like reported by Financial Express where employees marked sick despite resuming work, and as reported by Economic Times where a pilot trained for A320 reached for a flight to be operated by the 737. Many media houses had put in one or the other estimate for how many flights were impacted due to this.
The granular numbers for May have now been released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and that gives a good glimpse of what exactly happened in May with Air India Express.
Numbers don’t lie
Air India Express operated 2233 domestic flights in May 2024, which would average to 72 flights a day. On international routes, it operated 3349 departures, which would average to 108 departures per day. The airline has approval for 1239 weekly departures in the ongoing summer schedule, and at an average of 504 weekly flights, the slot compliance was at just over 40%, even below SpiceJet and better only to Flybig. It remains unclear if slots allocated by DGCA are taken back and hence the number is mapped against what was initially allocated and declared.
There is a drop against April numbers, when it operated 2976 domestic and 3218 international flights, an average of 99 domestic and 107 international departures per day. While it maintained the international departures despite the challenges, the domestic departures dropped by an average 27 departures a day. This is roughly 1% of total domestic flights in India, but a good quarter of its total flights as compared to the previous month.
Sister companies to the rescue
Media reports had indicated that parent Air India and other group companies AIX Connect and Vistara had stepped in to help fly the passengers booked on Air India Express. The data released by regulator shows AIX Connect operated 112 non-scheduled domestic departures in May, while its average was between 3 and 9 in the previous months, which makes it safe to assume that a large chunk of this was for Air India Express with which it is set to merge by March 2025.
Air India operated 433 non-scheduled domestic departures in May, while in April this number was 167 only. Vistara, which grappled with its own issues the previous month, operated 59 non-scheduled domestic departures in May as compared to 12 in April.
The challenge was always immediate accommodation since the airline had some time to plan the flights a day or two in advance, cancel the flights in advance and/or accommodate passengers.
How did the passengers respond?
The domestic load factors were marginally higher. The regulator clubs data of Air India Express under Air India for reporting purposes in monthly summary. Granular data shows that the airline had a domestic market share of 3.19% in April. In May, it went down to 2.3%. Overall, it was a drop of 0.9%. Air India Express’ domestic market share remains lower than erstwhile AirAsia India or AIX Connect which will merge with Air India Express.
In India, fares typically play a part in getting passengers back and hence despite repeated delays and cancellations by a few airlines, passengers continue to fly them. Air India Express, on the other hand, is better placed to tide over the issues – largely due to a whole gamut of Tata Airline ecosystem in place.
Tail Note
Issues at Boeing have not had an impact on the deliveries on the looks of it. However, the airline had a small fiasco after announcing the launch of flights to and from Hindon and then having to pull back, never starting the flights.
How has it performed in June? It will take some time to know this but if social media chatter is to be believed, there have been cancellations but not as bad as May.
Special Note
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