Yesterday, IndiGo launched flights to Rewa in Madhya Pradesh, with daily services from Indore. The airline is operating the ATR 72-600 aircraft on this route. My mind went back over a decade ago when the airline launched flights to Chandigarh. It launched Chandigarh with thrice daily flights from Mumbai, with each extending to Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai giving a seamless one-stop same aircraft connection. The capacity that it deployed was nearly equal to what was already present in the market between Go Air, Jet Airways and Air India pushing everybody else in the corner. Since then the airline has quite a few stations which handle seven or less than seven flights a week, a sub-optimal situation for any airline.
With data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, exclusively for this post, Network Thoughts looks at the one flight a day or less stations for airlines in India on the domestic routes.
Study done across nine airlines in India shows that Alliance Air tops with such stations where it operates once a day or less. A staggering 26 out of its 47 operational stations of 55% is where it operates a flight a day or less. This could be one of the reasons for its abysmal financial performance and perennial losses. The airline with a fleet of 21 aircraft is stretched across 47 stations with some of the planes not operational as well.
Star Air comes in next with 40% of all its stations seeing seven times a week flights or fewer. Star Air has a fleet of 11 planes and operates to 30 stations, many of which are under RCS-UDAN. Twelve of these see seven flights a week or less. IndiaOne and Fly91, both turbo props operators operate to eight stations, three of which see seven flights or less. Both these players have a large portion of their routes under the RCS-UDAN scheme, which forms the backbone of their finances.
Akasa Air, the Mumbai headquartered all Boeing airline operates to 23 stations, six of which see seven weekly flights or less. Air India also has six such stations, out of 43 domestic stations that it operates to, while SpiceJet has four such stations from its route network of 29 domestic stations. In terms of percentage, Akasa Air has 26.1%, while Air India stands at 14% and SpiceJet at 13.8%. Air India Express comes in next with 11.1% of its stations seeing seven flights or less per week. Five out of its 45 stations see such operations.
Rewa was the 10th such station for IndiGo, amongst its 95, which is 10.5% of its network. The others are Dharamshala, Kishangarh, Adampur, Bareilly, Gondia, Jagdalpur, Jorhath, Pantnagar and Shivamogga.
Can you identify such stations for other carriers? Drop in the list in the comments section.
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