Flier nos dive, but airline loads firm

After climbing higher for seven consecutive months, growth in air passenger traffic gave way to a small drop in January, declining 8.9% to 40.87 lakh passengers from 44.87 lakh in December.
On a year-on-year basis, however, domestic carriers flew 22.7% more fliers at 41.41 lakh people as against 33.76 lakh in the same month last year.

Local airlines also managed sell more seats on every plane this year compared with the last.

In January, load factors of most airlines were over 70%. In comparison, aircraft occupancies of airlines were hovering at mid-60% levels last year.

Experts said this was a sign of the sector returning to its heydays of 2007.

A senior SpiceJet official, who did not want to be named, said despite the lean season setting in January, the airlines have registered good load factors as demand continued to pick up due to the improving economic environment.

“These load factors are much closer to the numbers we saw around two years ago (2007), which is a good sign. This is essentially because airlines have taken control of their capacity, which have come down and is also similar to 2007,” he said.

Industry experts said local airlines can also expect load factors to stabilise in the coming months.

“Taking into consideration that the months ahead are usually lean, we will see passenger traffic stabilising. While there will be a marginal fall, it (the drop) will not cross over 5-7%,” said an analyst with a local broking firm, requesting not to be named.

The air traffic data put out by the Ministry of Civil Aviation on Friday shows that three out of four seats were occupied.  

The Naresh Goyal-owned airlines — Jet Airways and JetLite — maintained their lead in the industry with a total market share of 25.2%.

Kingfisher Airlines followed with a 22.2% share. Interestingly, the Vijay Mallya-owned Kingfisher has lost considerable market share in January this year compared with last year’s 27.2%.

IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir and Nacil widened their share with 15.3%, 12.2%, 5.4% and 18% compared with 13.7%, 11.8%, 2.4% and 16.7%, respectively last year.

All-business airline Paramount Airways saw its market share slip to 1.8% from 2.1% over the same period.

In terms of on-time-performance (OTP), Paramount was at the top with 87.3%, followed by Kingfisher 82.5%. IndiGo logged an OTP of 71.8%, followed by GoAir 71.5%, Jet 69.6%, SpiceJet 65.7%, Nacil 63.8% and JetLite 58.2%.