The details about footfalls at various airports evokes many emotions each month. The discussions range from anger to pride depending on which airport one is supporting or the city one belongs to. The true measure of capacity always is ASK (Available Seat Kilometer). However, ASK may not be the right measure from an airport perspective sicne there are airports in the country which have far higher frequencies to the gulf region and there are airports which have non-stops to the US of A.
Interested in buying Lapel pins? Click here
Data for this has been exclusively obtained from Cirium, an aviation analytics company. The top airports show no surprises with Delhi maintaining the lead in both Domestic and International seats on offer. The data shows departure seats per week.
The change in ranking could well be between Pune and Kochi over the next few months. However, Pune is contrained for growth as it is a military airfield with limited operations permitted while Kochi is a civilian airport and sees sharp seasonality, since a large portion of the traffic is to the gulf and dependent on the leave cycles there.
Interestingly, by number of departures the ranking does not change a bit when it comes to total seats or frequencies, which includes Domestic and International seats.
Top 10 international airports
The top 10 international airports are different than those in the top 10 of combined and this is so because there are certain airports like Trivandrum and Kozhikode which have high international footfalls as compared to others but not enough domestic ones to make it to the top 10. The battle here is between Hyderabad and Kochi, with Hyderabad aspiring to be the fifth largest international airport by end of this year.
Top 10 domestic airports
The top 10 airports by seats list the same airports which are part of the consolidated list, except that the orders have changed with Pune gaining two positions while Kochi sliding down to 10th.
Network Thoughts
For International flights, the foreign carriers are dependent on Point of Call (PoC) under the Bilateral Air Services Agreement, while Indian carriers selectiely add flights within their quota to balance the metro routes along with certain non-metro cities where there is year round demand.
Liked the analysis? Do drop in a comment on what other analysis would you like to see?
Found this article informative? Think of supporting Network Thoughts with Power of 10
Running this website incurs some cost, along with the data sourced for analytics. If you have liked this article, consider paying INR 10 via UPI. The site will continue to be free. This will help with the maintenance, upkeep and funding the research. You can also pay via Debit or Credit card by clicking on this link.
You can support Network Thoughts by ordering Network Thoughts baggage tags !
Follow NetworkThoughts on X (Formerly Twitter), Bsky, Facebook and YouTube.