Air India Express has been on an expansion spree in recent months. However, not all has gone according to its announcements. The airline announced flights to Singapore from Mangalore, which never took off and the same happened with flights to Dhaka, which seemingly was due to the political situation, even as other airlines including parent Air India continued flying to Dhaka.
In June last year, Air India Express announced that it would start flights from Hindon, on the outskirts of Delhi from August 01, 2024. I had expressed my surprise to this decision since I knew about the long standing dispute between Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) and the decision to open up operations at Hindon. With capacity going up to 100 million at Delhi airport, it was all the more surprising for the airport to allow operations in the vicinity. The operations never took-off, pretty much as I had expected. In January this year, news reports indicated that DIAL has withdrawn the case, allowing normal operations to resume at Hindon, which was hitherto restricted only for RCS-UDAN flights seeing Flybig and Star Air operating.
Phase 1
The airline will operate 13 weekly flights from Bengaluru, six times a week from Kolkata and a daily flight to Goa – Dabolim. This starts March 01, 2025.
Phase 2
The airline will further strengthen its Hindon operations with flights from Chennai and Jammu. This will take its weekly departures count to 40. It has a little over 300 domestic departures from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, most of which it inherited with the merger of AirAsia India into Air India Express. This starts towards the end of March.
With this, Hindon will be connected to 10 destinations, with some monopoly ones where there is no connectivity from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport.
What does it mean for Air India Express?
As and when the airport at Jewar opens up, the airline is likely to start operations from there as well, making it the only airline to operate from all three airports serving the National Capital Region (NCR). IndiGo is known to chase competition but thus far it has not announced anything from Hindon. Will this change in the upcoming Summer schedule?
Air India Express has a dual role of taking on IndiGo and feeding the select international flights of Air India. The role will evolve further when the integration with the Frequent Flier Program also takes place in due course of time.
What does it mean for Delhi Airport and Noida Airport?
For Delhi Airport, it looks like a strategy to open up an airport between Delhi and Noida, with Hindon being closer to the city than Jewar’s Noida International Airport. If it has to compete with Noida, it might as well allow Hindon. I wonder if the GMR group will be open to managing the terminal at Hindon, on the lines of how they are doing at Bidar. The airport at Bidar is currently not operational for civil flights. For Noida, this is unwarranted competition but restricted to a few sectors.
Network Thoughts
Air India Express is getting a constant supply of capacity, partly from Boeing and partly from parent Air India. In a typical high growth scenario, execution is the key and the airline will have to go great lengths to ensure it can expand at the pace which it intends to. So far that has not been the case, with cancellations and complaints on the rise.
Hindon seems like a well executed plan going by the schedule. The airport and terminal have challenges but not for such a small operation. The benefit of same crew base for Delhi and Hindon will be an added advantage.
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