- On a YoY basis, Chennai will see 21.3% lower departures, and 15.1% by seats on offer
- Hyderabad comes in next with 18.7% lower departures, and 15.7% lower seats on offer
Starting July 01, more flights have been curtailed in domestic skies in India. The website of the Ministry of Civil Aviation which publishes the daily count of flights and passengers showed 2826 domestic flights on June 30, which carried 4,26,475 passengers. On July 01, this number dropped to 2698 flights and the passenger count was just sustaining above the 4 lakh mark, at 4,03,790.
The first day of July also saw an increase in flights from Noida International Airport after the token start a fortnight ago. Yet, the net result was negative at a country level. In a country where the majority of the traffic originates or terminates from one of the top six metro airports, which airport is impacted the most? Data for this blog has been sourced from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.
In a typical scenario, the seasonality is always checked with the same month last year. However, last year July was an immediate aftermath of the AI 171 crash at Ahmedabad. The analysis below includes both, a year on year case followed by a sequential scenario where July 2026 is compared with June 2026.
Year on Year – Delhi the outliner
Delhi, the largest airport in the country remains an outlier when compared year over year, with the airport seeing a 2% growth in departures this July compared to previous July. The same also translates into seats on offer, with domestic seats being 4% higher than last July, thanks primarily to the deployment of A321s by IndiGo replacing the A320s and Akasa Air adding capacity with the MAX 8 -200 with up to 197 seats from its previous MAX 8 offering.
The most impacted airport amongst the metro airports is Chennai, which has lost about 22% of its departures compared to last July. This comes amidst SpiceJet pulling out all flights from Chennai this July and also leads to Chennai dropping below the 1000 flights a week mark on the domestic front. Kolkata will also see fewer than 1000 domestic flights a week, where the drop is 17% over previous year. Hyderabad which sees a drop of 19% will remain above the 1000 domestic flights a week mark.
Mumbai and Bengaluru see a cut of 14% and 13% respectively. These cuts will possibly lead to Mumbai regaining the number two slot for the month of July, while the May and June data is awaited from regulators. The impact on Bengaluru is lower in terms of seats available since some services on the ATR have been upgraded to narrowbody aircraft.
It is worrying to see the flights and seats go down on a year over year basis. Typially, air traffic grows each year and when the seasonality changes come up, the flights each year for the same season are more than the previous year, except that this year the impact seems to be more.
Sequential
Air India had already started reducing the flights from June, while IndiGo joined in later. The flights in June were already lower after a bumper May. All six airports are lower in the range of 8.5% to 9.5%, except Navi Mumbai airport which is seeing a larger drop of 18.8%. Navi Mumbai is not one of the top six airports, but included here on sequential basis since the Mumbai area now has two airports. While Mumbai sees a drop, Navi Mumbai sees a larger drop, an indicator of the challenges which the airport has in terms of last mile connectivity.
On a sequential basis, Chennai had the least impacts in terms of seats at 6.3% while the maximum impact came at Navi Mumbai at 20%. Barring Navi Mumbai, the surprising decrease was at Delhi Airport with 9.3% seats lower in July as compared to the previous month.
Network Thoughts
The practice started by airlines to reduce the flights in the lean season, even when it comes at a cost of increased air fares for the passengers is a healthy practice as compared to the earlier times when airlines were under cutting each other to attract passengers, hoping for higher loads as compared to higher yields. The losses will be lower with some possibility of profits as well. In the past, slots at Mumbai were protected by not cancelling flights and the fear of other carriers snatching away those slots. However, this has since changed.
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