From January to April, Indian carriers flew 57.5 million passengers (Photo: MIG)
Indian carriers flew 13.8 million domestic passengers in April, down 3.47 pc from 14.3 million in April last year. It was also lower than March, when airlines flew 14.4 million people, a drop of 4.2 pc in just one month, says the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in its monthly traffic report.
The DGCA says that from January to April, Indian carriers flew 57.5 million passengers. In the same period last year, they had carried 57.5 million, translating into a marginal growth of 0.06 pc.
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This marks a steep fall in growth for a sector that was growing at 7 to 10 pc every year for most of the last decade.
In 2014, India flew around 70 million domestic passengers in a full year. By 2019, that had grown to 137 million. Low fares, new budget carriers, and the UDAN scheme connecting smaller towns all pushed numbers up. The country had 74 airports in 2014 and 163 by late 2025.
The report says that Covid shut everything down in 2020. However, the recovery after that was strong. In April 2023, a single day set a record with 456,082 people flying on domestic routes. The full year 2025 came in at 166.9 million passengers, up 3.48 pc from 161.3 million in 2024.
On the market share side, low-cost carrier IndiGo, now holds 65 pc of all domestic passengers, up from 63.3 pc in March, two out of every three people flying domestically in India chose IndiGo in April. The airline also had the best on-time performance at 88.5 pc across ten airports: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Cochin, Guwahati and Lucknow.
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Tata Group carrier Air India was second at 24.7 pc, down from 26.2 pc in March, with on-time performance of 82.4 pc. India’s newest airline Akasa Air was at 5.8 pc, up slightly from 5.4 pc the month before, says the report.
SpiceJet was at 3.4 pc in April, down from 3.8 pc in March. Its on-time performance was 31.2 pc, meaning less than one in three flights arrived on time. In January 2023, SpiceJet had 7.3 pc of the market. It has lost more than half that share in three years through financial trouble, grounded aircraft and an emergency fundraise of INR 30 billion that has not visibly improved things for passengers. Alliance Air dropped to 0.3 pc from 0.6 pc.
According to report, across all airlines, 3,266 complaints were filed in April, or 2.36 per 10,000 passengers. About 1.12 pc of flights were delayed by more than two hours.