Domestic air passenger traffic grows by over 16% to 11.86 mn in May: DGCA

Budget carrier IndiGo continued to be the market leader, carrying 4.85 mn passengers in May, while full-service carrier Jet Airways followed it, carrying 1.62 mn passengers

Domestic air passenger traffic grew 16.53 per cent to 11.86 million in May this year over the same period a year ago, according to data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Tuesday.

Twelve domestic airlines together flew 11.85 million passengers as compared to 10.17 million passengers in May 2017, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) released figures said.

Budget carrier IndiGo continued to be the market leader, carrying 4.85 million passengers in May, while full service carrier Jet Airways followed it, carrying 1.62 million passengers.

According to the DGCA data, budget carrier SpiceJet recorded the highest load factor during the month at 94.8 per cent, followed by IndiGo at 91 per cent. The load factor of state-run Air India, in comparison, stood at 81.3 per cent and it carried 1.51 million passengers in May.

"This is the 38th month in a row that we have flown the highest loads in the Indian aviation market which is a testament of the combined effort put in by SpiceJet," the airline said after the release of the DGCA data.

The cancellation rate of Air Odisha and Air Deccan, both of whom have entered the aviation map of the country under the regional connectivity scheme, remained the highest. In case of the former, the cancellation rate stood at 44.22 per cent and 12.12 per cent in case of the latter.

Over 194,000 passengers were affected because of delays by all the domestic carriers put together and 724 passenger- related complaints had been received by the scheduled domestic airlines.

With regard to on-time performance (OTP), IndiGo continued to lead the rest, registering an OTP of 80.9 per cent.

The OTP was based on the data collected from the airports of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad only.

"On-time performance is the core of our business and is one of the three values that IndiGo stands for," said the airline's chief commercial officer Sanjay Kumar.