Fly91’s firm order for 40 ATR 72-600s lands at a moment when its own fleet stands at just six aircraft, a bet that India’s regional and Tier 2/3 markets have room to run. It’s worth checking that bet against the last decade of data, because the headline growth numbers and the metro concentration numbers tell two different stories that need to be read together.
In 2009, Indian aviation carried 4,33,35,849 domestic passengers across 5,08,051 flights, spread across an airline list that reads like a different industry today: Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways, IndiGo, SpiceJet, Air India, Indian Airlines, Air India Express, Go Air, Paramount Airways and MDLR, among a few smaller others. Ten years later, in 2019, the last full pre-COVID year, and also the year Jet Airways went under, domestic flights had roughly doubled to 10,58,920, while passengers had grown even faster, to 14,37,36,256, over triple the 2009 base. Flights doubled, but passengers more than tripled, which means the average load per flight rose from about 85 in 2009 to roughly 136 in 2019, a 59% jump. Some of that is better load factors, but a large part of it is gauge: 2009’s schedule still carried real turboprop and smaller-jet capacity from Kingfisher, the original Jet Airways, and Indian Airlines’ ATR/737 mix, while 2019’s growth came overwhelmingly from A320/737-family jets flown by IndiGo, SpiceJet and the reconstituted Jet Airways. India didn’t just fly more; it flew fuller, bigger aircraft on the routes that mattered.
A decade of change
The decade in between wasn’t a straight line. Kingfisher Airlines folded in 2012, Paramount Airways and MDLR shut earlier still, and Jet Airways, propped up by an Etihad equity infusion in 2013, finally grounded itself in April 2019. IndiGo, which barely registered as a capacity driver in 2009, was the market leader well before the decade closed, and newer names Vistara, AirAsia India entered a market that had just finished burying several of its 2009-era operators.
Alongside that churn, government policy started courting the smaller cities Fly91 now targets. The Regional Connectivity Scheme, UDAN, launched in October 2016, with its first flight in April 2017, built around a ten-year mandate to revive unserved and underserved airports through fare caps and viability gap funding. It worked in one sense: India went from 74 operational airports in 2014 to over 160 by late 2025. It struggled in another: over 90% of UDAN routes lapsed once subsidy support ended, with barely 7-10% commercially viable on their own, and the scheme has moved a cumulative 1.56 crore passengers in nine years — roughly what Indian domestic aviation carries every five to six weeks today. 2025 itself closed as the best-ever year for domestic Indian aviation, 16.69 crore passengers, despite the Air India crash in Ahmedabad and the disruption Operation Sindoor caused to schedules in May.
Metro dominance is eroding, but only marginally
Set against that growth, the metro concentration numbers move in the opposite direction, but slowly. In the last one year, 55.3% of domestic passengers departed from one of India’s six metro airports Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata down from 64.5% a decade ago. Total footfall at the same six airports, compared to all-India domestic footfall, tells a nearly identical story: 57.2% last fiscal versus 65% ten years back. Both measures have shed roughly 8-9 percentage points of metro share over ten years, even as the passenger base tripled.
Read the two data sets together and the picture sharpens. A roughly nine-point decline in metro share over a decade in which total volumes more than tripled means the metros aren’t losing passengers in any absolute sense they’re simply not capturing all of the new growth, while still capturing well over half of it. UDAN’s own numbers explain why the shift hasn’t been sharper: a scheme explicitly built to redirect growth toward Tier 2/3 airports has moved a rounding error’s worth of passengers relative to the base, because most of the routes it opened couldn’t sustain themselves once subsidies ended. The metros aren’t holding share through inertia so much as through the simple fact that most viable air travel demand in India business travel, connecting traffic, high-frequency corridors still originates or terminates at one of six airports.
This is the market Fly91 is entering with a 40-aircraft order. Its network so far, built around Goa, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and a clutch of Tier 2/3 points like Sindhudurg, Jalgaon and Solapur, sits squarely inside the shrinking-but-still-dominant metro share, using metros with spokes into smaller markets rather than trying to bypass them. That’s the more survivable model UDAN’s own route-discontinuation numbers point to: connectivity built around metros, not against them.
Network Thoughts
The decade-old story that Indian aviation is “decentralising” is true only in the loosest sense. Flights roughly doubled and passengers more than tripled between 2009 and 2019, and metro share has slipped by under 10 percentage points even over a longer stretch that includes UDAN’s entire life so far hardly the redrawing of the map the scheme’s messaging suggests. What actually changed was gauge and frequency at the top of the network, not the network’s centre of gravity.
That has a direct bearing on how to read large turboprop orders like Fly91’s 40 ATR 72-600s, or IndiGo’s since-completed 50-aircraft ATR commitment before it. Both are, structurally, bets on the roughly 40-45% of demand sitting outside the six metros which is real and growing, but consistently harder to convert into durable route economics than city-pair press releases suggest. IndiGo’s ATR fleet, delivered in full, still contributes only a sliver of its total capacity and has seen far more route churn than its mainline network a preview, perhaps, of the discipline Fly91 will need if forty aircraft are to find forty aircraft’s worth of viable flying, rather than the fate that met most of UDAN’s own routes.
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