Indian aviation has been growing steadily over the last two decades, despite airlines going down or facing headwinds. One of the growth factors has been an increase in operational airports which have gone up from somewhere between 70 and 80 to 125 over the last decade. The traffic and fleet doubled every nine years. As traffic moved from the metro to metro routes to metro to Tier I and Tier II, the Delhi – Mumbai – Delhi sector dropped out of top 10 city pairs in the world. Both these airports are congested and while other such pairs increased capacity, Indian carriers could not as it also had to connect other airports coming up.
From the merger of Vistara – Air India to dual class offering by IndiGo, the focus has always remained on the top routes in the country with focus around the Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru triangle. Over the years, a mix of Route Dispersal Guidelines, yield, growth, capacity issues led to stagnation of Chennai and Kolkata. Ironically, these two airports were never privatised and one wonders if the situation today would have been different had these airports been under private management when Delhi and Mumbai were privatised and greenfield airports at Bengaluru and Hyderabad were being set up.
This blog post today looks at the top 10 airport pairs by frequency within the same state, a metric which has been often left unseen. Data has been obtained exclusively from Cirium – an aviation analytics company.
The top 10 intrastate routes
Four out of ten routes belong to the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Considering there are only six airports which are operational in Tamil Nadu, the four city pairs speak a lot about the business and economy. Karnataka, Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan have one each.
Two routes, Chennai – Coimbatore and Chennai – Madurai are the busiest intrastate routes in the country. Both see 63 weekly flights each way or 9 flights a day. Both also see IndiGo operate eight out of these nine flights and Air India operating the remaining one.
The third busiest route is the Bengaluru – Mangaluru route in Karnataka which sees 52 weekly flights each way, split 38 by IndiGo and 14 by Air India. Chennai – Trichy comes in fourth with 46 weekly flights each way, all by IndiGo. The Srinagar – Jammu route sees a fair mix of airlines, occupying fifth position with 45 weekly flights split between IndiGo (19), Air India (13), Air India Express (7) and SpiceJet (6).
The Kolkata – Bagdogra route in West Bengal sees 42 weekly flights with IndiGo operating half of those and Air India Express and SpiceJet operating 14 and 7 respectively. The Mumbai – Nagpur route in Maharashtra also sees 42 weekly flights, split between IndiGo (28) and Air India (14). Tamil Nadu is back on the radar again with Chennai – Tuticorin at eight position, with all 28 weekly flights operated by IndiGo.
The two spots are taken by the Vizag – Vijayawada route seeing 21 weekly flights, 14 by IndiGo and 7 by Air India Express. The Jaipur – Udaipur route in Rajasthan completes the top 10, with IndiGo operating all 15 weekly flights between these two tourism magnets.
Two routes out of these, the Srinagar – Jammu – Srinagar and Kolkata – Bagdogra – Kolkata sectors offer Category 2A and Category 2 benefits under the Route Dispersal Guidelines (RDG). Had it been an undivided Andhra Pradesh, the Hyderabad based flights to Tirupati, Vizag, Rajahmundry et al would have been on the top. However, now that it is not a reality after the state split into two and Telangana having Hyderabad as the only operational airport currently.
Network Thoughts
The top three city pairs here are ideal to be described as “shuttle markets”, a concept popular in the west where smaller jets offer a widespread frequency with the market demanding frequent flights.
Over the years, these are prime candidates to have high speed rail, in absence of safe roads in the country. Subject to slots at metro airports, these airports are also prime candidates to have higher frequency with lower capacity aircraft providing more choice to the passengers and quicker return to base for businessmen, traders, students and government officials.
Special Note
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