- Saturday, May 04, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
The final day of April witnessed a record being created in India’s domestic aviation sector with 456,082 passengers flying on a single day.
The milestone was reached as 2,978 flights took off across the country, which is now called as the most populous in the world, the BBC reported.
India’s civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia was elated over the development and said in a tweet, “The skyrocketing domestic passenger traffic post Covid is a reflection of India’s high growth.”
While the South Asian nation witnessed a dip in the travel industry during the Covid-19 pandemic, its post-pandemic recovery has moved things up again.
India’s post-pandemic economic recovery has spurred a travel boom.
The BBC report added that domestic carriers carried more than 37.5 million passengers in the first three months of the current year. This marked a 51.7 per cent rise compared to a year ago, data from the country’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation showed.
“There was no growth for two years during Covid. What we are witnessing now is a snowballing of that pent-up demand,” Mark Martin, an aviation analyst, was quoted as saying by the BBC.
He also said that there has been a significant rise in the number of first-time flyers since the pandemic.
According to Martin, air traffic in India has been growing typically at twice the pace of the country’s gross domestic product, thanks to a rise in disposable incomes in the third largest economy of Asia.
Earlier, a report from International Air Transport Association showed that domestic traffic in India had continued to race towards the pre-pandemic levels, and was down only 2.2 per cent on February 2019 levels.
India was also the top domestic market at 81.6 per cent in terms of passenger-load factor — the percentage of seats filled by airlines — compared to countries such as the US, China, Japan, Australia and Brazil.
However, the industry continued to suffer due to higher prices of aviation turbine fuel, a depreciating rupee against the US dollar and stranded aircraft.
Over 50 planes of major Indian airlines such as IndiGo and Go First have remained grounded for several months due to Pratt & Whitney engine-related issues.
“Airlines are losing billions of dollars because of this. We need at least 150 more aircraft to join the fleet to ease the load,” Martin told the BBC.
India has around 1,100 fleet deliveries pending over the next few years, ratings agency ICRA said, according to the BBC.
