India Emerging As Key Aviation Market: IATA Report

India is fast emerging as a key global aviation market, according to the latest market analysis report of the International Air Transport Association ( IATA). India’s domestic air travel has continued to grow robustly and as of February, it was a mere 2.2 per cent shy of reaching pre-pandemic levels measured by passenger revenue kilometres (PRK).

The India domestic passenger market also led the rest of the domestic markets in the passenger load factor (PLF) metric in the report which includes the US, China and Japanese domestic markets. It has been the top domestic market measured by PLF for the last four months achieving PLFs of 81.6 per cent in February, 85.2 per cent in January, 88.9 per cent in December 2022, and 87.9 per cent in November 2022.

Globally, traffic is now at 84.9 per cent of February 2019 levels. Total traffic in February 2023, based on RPKs, rose 55.5 per cent compared to February 2022.

The report added, “Asia-Pacific airlines had a 378.7 per cent increase in February 2023 traffic compared to February 2022, maintaining the very positive momentum of the past few months since the lifting of travel restrictions in the region. Capacity rose 176.4 per cent and the load factor increased 34.9 percentage points to 82.5 per cent, the second highest among the regions.”

Domestic air passenger traffic for all markets measured for February rose 25.2 per cent compared to one year ago. Total February 2023 domestic traffic was at 97.2 per cent of the February 2019 level.

At the moment, it is estimated that only about 35 to 40 million Indians travel by air every year. Although World Bank data shows that pre-COVID India had about 168 million air transport passengers, many are repeat flyers. This is much lower than China, which has a similar population and has 660 million air transport passengers during the same period in 2019. Chinese airlines also have about five times as many planes.

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With a rapidly growing middle class and rising incomes, together with the right encouragement including lower airfares, many, including airline companies, are expecting India to become the fastest-growing aviation market for years to come.

Swiss airline intelligence provider, ch-aviation reported in March this year that French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that IndiGo Airlines could announce an order for “several hundred” Airbus aircraft at the Paris Air Show to be held at Paris Le Bourget Airport in June.

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IndiGo, the largest airline in India has over 300 aircraft and currently provides over 35 per cent of all the available seat kilometres on flights in and out of India’s airports. Measured by flight frequencies, IndiGo provides almost 48 per cent of all flights across India’s international and domestic markets.

Source – ANI