As a fellow writer on NetworkThoughts and friend going by the name BOMLHR on social media posted the IndiGo cuts for July, we got discussing the reasons for this and how the airline is managing it. After some very interesting and long discussions, I decided to write about this under the “Understanding Aviation” series for the multiple facets this brings to the fore.
IndiGo, India’s largest carrier, is cutting down domestic capacity by over 10% this July. Surprising as it may seem, IndiGo is shrinking by 11.3% by frequency, 10.4% by seats and 11.6% by ASM (Available Seat Miles), shows data shared by Cirium, an aviation analytics company, exclusively for this post with no rights to reproduce. This is a sharp dip in capacity by the airline and translates to over 1500 fewer departures per week on domestic routes. This however is a great case study to understand Capacity Management. The July – September quarter is the leanest quarter in Indian aviation as Monsoon takes over all parts of the country, coinciding with new academic session for schools and lack of holidays, barring one or two odd long weekends.
Domestic sectors with service reductions
There are significant cuts (all numbers weekly frequencies) happening on Hyderabad – Kochi (-13), Delhi – Bagdogra (-13), Bengaluru – Bagdogra (-13), Delhi – Mopa (-11), Delhi – Ahmedabad (-11), Hyderabad – Ranchi (-9), Hyderabad – Coimbatore (-8), Hyderabad – Bengaluru (-8), Bengaluru – Guwahati (-8), Chennai – Vizag (-7), Hyderabad – Varanasi (-7), Bengaluru – Varanasi (-7) amongst others.
Of all the cuts, the maximum seem to be from Delhi with 240 weekly departures being canned, followed by Hyderabad with 204 weekly departures and Bengaluru with 193 departures being cut and Chennai comes in fourth with 113 domestic departures being cut, when compared against May 2025. The cuts will see lower utilisation of its ATR fleet.
Where are the planes going?
The planes are not going anywhere. Interestingly, the lost capacity in domestic is being shifted to international for a short period. International sectors will see an increase of 11.1% in frequencies, 10.6% in seats and 15.2% in capacity by ASM.
International sectors with service increases
IndiGo is resuming flights to Jeddah from Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai; flights to Bangkok and Phuket from Mumbai to offer two way connections to Manchester and Amsterdam; to Bahrain and Dammam from Kochi, amongst others.
Why is IndiGo doing this?
What IndiGo is doing is known as “Capacity management” to adjust to the good and bad times in the market. The ultimate goal for any airline is to make money. It makes money by flying on routes which can fetch passengers paying ticket prices which cover costs, as a bare minimum and makes money, which are profits. During the leaner times domestically, the airline has found a way to cut capacity under the belief that they are aligned closer to what the demand is. This can be done by reducing one whole frequency a day in case of routes where there are multiple frequencies and on routes which have only one frequency a day, this is done by reducing the weekly operations from seven to four or three. Additionally, the airline is also catering to the runway closure at Delhi, which started and got into a controversy immediately due to changing wind patterns requiring longer hold times and thus delays. The ILS (Instrumentation Landing System) work for Runway 10/28 at Delhi will now begin in the second half of June going by news reports.
From an airline network planning perspective, this is more complex than it appears. This is because any airline has to factor in the connections which are made and missed by each frequency, its impact on the overall network and most importantly which frequencies to remove to ensure that one whole plane is freed up, to be redeployed somewhere else. This means that one cannot remove multiple flights only in the afternoon or late nights but have a balance across the day.
For IndiGo, the end result is a 3.8% lower ASMs across its network, while count of flights will be lower by 8.7%. The ASMs are not cut as high as the flight count because of the longer international flights catering to a similar Available Seat miles but lower cycles. Yet, July 2025 will see 9.5% higher ASMs than July 2024. The airline is yet to give a guidance in capacity for Q2-FY26.
Network Thoughts
Indian aviation has not seen capacity management being used effectively across the network like in the western world. Airlines like Ryan Air or EasyJet have a significant difference in operations, in peak and off-peak months. Every airline has tried it in the past but kept it restricted to a few routes and not go for such a large change with IndiGo is going ahead with. One of the early examples was Go Air operating flights to Port Blair from Mumbai from October to February and using the same slots and block times to operate to Leh from March to September. The market has lacked the maturity levels of such sort of capacity management in the past, largely due to issues with slot management but airports, too, are coming of age in India.
I went around checking the data for other carriers as well and found that Akasa Air is doing a similar exercise, though at a smaller scale, while both Air India and Air India Express are not doing this actively as the changes are minimal and mostly unrelated to a shift of network like IndiGo.
For any airline, what matters the most is making maximum revenue and profits or losing least money and capacity management is an effective way of juggling the network to ensure that utilisation remains high so that cost base is not disturbed. The push and pull includes Maintenance which has to cater to the flying hours along with cycles (landings and take-offs), crew utilisation and cost optimisation. Any cut in flying can lead to fixed costs being divided across the smaller operation. This means that flights which were on the fence when it came to profitability can turn negative. However, this does not mean that one can keep adding flights and utilisation since a tipping point is reached beyond which the maintenance costs could balloon like never before. This fine balance is largely maintained by Airline Network Planners in coordination with multiple departments and is the sole reason I call it a mix of Art and Science.
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