An aviation hub: Indian airports must upgrade to attract global travellers

It has been reported that Air India, the country’s only remaining major full-service carrier, intends to try and increase its attractiveness to international travellers — both those wishing to fly in and out of India as well as those that might find it convenient to use an Indian airport as a transit hub while travelling between two international destinations. The airline has said that Delhi airport, India’s most trafficked, receives less than a hundredth of the 130 million or so passengers who pass through India’s airspace annually; Dubai, in comparison, receives 10 per cent of these and Doha 7.5 per cent. Clearly, there is room for improvement in this respect. The airline also believes that more direct flights to international destinations will help its bottom line. Certainly, it is sitting on multiple lucrative landing slots in various international airports that it could better utilise. 

Air India’s major competitor domestically, low-cost carrier IndiGo, has also ramped up international operations of late. It has been reported, for example, that after the regulators relaxed the prohibition on Indian airlines “wet leasing” planes — renting an aircraft with a crew and passengers — IndiGo is exploring such an arrangement with a Scandinavian airline for connecting flights in Europe. It currently has an arrangement with Turkish Airlines to fly passengers out of India to Istanbul, where they (the passengers) can connect to European destinations; it hopes to operate direct flights to a London airport at some point, though for the moment it appears it may have to settle for Manchester. If this pans out, it will be able to utilise its large domestic network to connect passengers to a British airport through its hub in Delhi. 

This excellent opportunity for sectoral growth and increased convenience for passengers will, however, require the co-operation of airport operators and regulators, as well as other government agencies. Creating an international hub is not easy. Only about 20 per cent of traffic in Delhi is transfer traffic, which allows a great deal of room for improvement. However, the reasons for this low number, and the popularity of transit hubs in India’s near abroad such as Dubai and Singapore, must be properly understood. Those airports are efficient, promising a low transfer time and great reliability. They also have more connections than any Indian airport. It has been too easy to blame the success of such airports on past decisions to grant bilateral landing rights to airlines that use them as hubs. The question that should be asked is why passengers prefer to use them, once given an option. 

Without the cooperation of the relevant authorities in streamlining processes, these attempts are unlikely to succeed. One such requirement is reordering the operations of Customs. Checking baggage should be made easier, rather than requiring passengers to pick up their luggage in order to go through Customs. International transit will require rejigging schedules so as to ensure a convenient transfer time, and for baggage-handling protocols to be made more efficient at Delhi airport. Expansions to the airport’s capacity have also been long promised; last year, Delhi airport said it would increase peak efficiency by almost a third, to handle 110 takeoffs and landings an hour. The ambitions of the large airlines and of airports all match up; regulation, oversight, and capacity should be adapted to meet these new aspirations.