Airline’s available seat kilometres rose to 650m this month from 540m in June
As budget carrier Air Deccan goes into expansion overdrive, it has increased its capacity by around 20% since June.
In a call-in analyst meet, organised by international broking firm ASK Raymond James early this week, Deccan Aviation Ltd’s chief revenue officer Mohan Kumar said the airline’s average available seat kilometres (ASKs) has shot up to 650 million this month from 540 million ASKs in June.
In terms of seat, the airline was doing an average of about 20,300 seats a day in the previous quarter (April-June), which is up to 25,600 seats a day this month. This, Kumar said, does impact the average load factor adversely.
He, however, clarified load factors of matured flights (which have been operating for over one year) have shown consistent trend of upswing. Also the variance in seasonality of these flights is not more than 6-8%
“So the analysis of the average load factor will not give you any proper indication unless you go for a proper qualitative analysis of classifying the flights age-wise and comparing its load factor between seasons and non-seasons,” said Kumar. However, despite capacity expansion, the airline flew lesser number of passengers in the July-September quarter (its first quarter of the fiscal 2006-07) than in the April-June quarter due to lean season.
It carried 1.38 million passengers in the first quarter as against 1.46 million passengers in the previous quarter. This brought down its average load factor to 72.6% from 77.29%.
Interestingly, Kumar informed that not all new routes take time to mature. Some of them are profitable from the first day or first week itself. Giving example of such routes, he said Delhi-Dehradun, Delhi-Kulu and Chennai-Tuticorin started generating profit on day one while Coimbatore-Hyderabad, an airbus flight, turned profitable in a week’s time.
“So there are some routes which make profit within a week, or on the very first day. But these are very few … that kind of opportunities are very less. Most of the time, you need to develop the routes,” Kumar said.
