IndiGo makes aviation history in India, hits record 900 daily flights

An IndiGo Airbus A320 aircraft operating as 6E 756 between Bhubaneshwar and Chennai created a record on Friday. This was the airline's 900th daily flight, the most by any Indian airline.

IndiGo is the country's largest domestic airline with 40 per cent of the market share. IndiGo's flights are nearly equal to the combined operations of Jet Airways and SpiceJet.

Jet Airways operates 650 flights daily and SpiceJet flies 343 flights daily. Air India and its subsidiaries, Alliance Air and Air India Express, operate over 520 daily flights.

Having added 24 planes in the financial year 2016-2017, the highest capacity addition among all the airlines, IndiGo has 131 Airbus A320 aircraft now. It flies to 44 destinations, with over 90 per cent of its flights flying to domestic destinations. Its longest route is Delhi-Thiruvananthapuramuram and the shortest route is between Amritsar and Jammu.

IndiGo has added over 100 flights in the past ten months. Last June, IndiGo was operating 806 flights with 108 aircraft.

In a statement, Aditya Ghosh, president and whole-time director, IndiGo, said, “We at IndiGo are thrilled on having flown 900 daily flights for the first time on Friday. I understand it's some kind of a record for civil aviation in India. Now the team is excited to reach the 1,000-flight milestone." 

Among the large international airlines, Emirates flies over 500 flights daily, with its network stretching from South America to New Zealand. United Airlines operates five times the number of flights that IndiGo does at over 4,500 flights daily.