The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reports that India is fast emerging as a key Global Aviation Market.Domestic air travel has continued to rise strongly in India. As of February, India’s domestic air travel was just 2.2% away from pre-pandemic levels as measured by passenger revenue.
It has been the top domestic market measured by PLF for the last four months, achieving PLFs of 81.6 percent in February, 85.2 percent in January, 88.9 percent in December 2022, and 87.9 percent in November 2022. It has 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. The report also included details on a 378.7 per cent increase of Asia-Pacific airlines 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. As of right now, 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.
Factors such as a rapidly growing middle class, rising incomes, lower airfares, and many more such factors expect India to become the fastest-growing aviation market for years to come. IndiGo, the largest Airline in India, has over 300 Aircraft and currently provides over 35 percent of all the available seat kilometres on flights in and out of India’s airports. Measured by flight frequencies, IndiGo provides almost 48 percent of all flights across India’s International and Domestic Markets.
