Domestic air traffic rises 5.7% to 1.31 crore in Aug: Official data

Indian airlines carried 1.31 crore passengers in August, an increase of 5.7 percent compared to the year-ago period, according to official data released on Friday.

In August 2023, carriers had flown 1.24 crore domestic passengers while in July this year, the count stood at 1.29 crore.

The report released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) showed that last month, flight delays impacted 1,79,744 passengers with airlines shelling out around ₹2.44 crore towards facilitation.

As many as 38,599 passengers were affected by flight cancellations and carriers spent about ₹1.14 crore for compensation and facilities.

"The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for the month of August 2024 has been 0.83 percent," the report said.

A total of 728 passengers were denied boarding and the amount spent towards compensation and facilities in this regard was ₹77.96 lakh.

"Passengers carried by domestic airlines during January-August 2024 were 1,054.66 lakh as against 1,006.16 lakh during the corresponding period of the previous year thereby registering an annual growth of 4.82 percent and monthly growth of 5.70 percent," the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said in its report.

In terms of On Time Performance (OTP), Akasa Air was on top at 71.2 percent in August, followed by Vistara (68.6 percent) and AIX Connect (66.8 percent).

Both IndiGo and Air India's OTP stood at 66 percent in August while that of Alliance Air and SpiceJet was at 55.3 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

OTP has been computed for four metro airports -- Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

SpiceJet, which continues to grapple with multiple headwinds and is also now under enhanced surveillance of DGCA, saw its domestic market share drop to 2.3 percent in August from 3.1 percent in July.

In August, IndiGo's market share rose to 62.4 percent and that of Air India climbed to 14.7 percent.

While Vistara also saw its market share increase to 10.3 percent on a month-on-month basis, the share of AIX Connect and Akasa Air declined to 4.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.

Alliance Air's market share in August stood unchanged at 0.9 percent.

A total of 1,031 passenger-related complaints were received by the scheduled domestic airlines last month. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers carried for August 2024 was around 0.79, the DGCA said.