More passengers are impacted by delayed flights than ever before, shows data

As the roof collapsed at Delhi airport leading to distribution of flights from T1 to the other two terminals, the On Time Performance took a beating. While once there have been allegations and counter allegations on OTP in Indian skies, it has been silently sliding over the last many months and passengers have been at the receiving end with no solution in sight. Most frequent fliers have a delayed flight to report and surprisingly, IndiGo - once the torchbearer of OTP has seen its OTP sliding down.

May marked the seven straight months since IndiGo - India’s largest carrier by fleet and market share, topped the On Time Performance rankings. On-Time was its USP over a decade ago when it was a budding airline. Similarly, Air India - which topped the On Time Performance charts a few months after privatisation in what looked like a promising start towards an early turnaround is no more leading them. While over a quarter of the passengers see delayed flights from metro’s, the worrisome part is that the absolute number of passengers who are impacted by delayed flights has gone up over the years.

Sample this, in May 2024, IndiGo recorded an OTP of 72.8% at four metro airports while Air India was 68.4%. IndiGo’s OTP was 81% in February 2020 and 90.3% last May. This means that 27.2% of IndiGo’s departures from the four metro cities viz. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad were delayed in May 2024 as compared to only 9.7% delays in May 2023.

IndiGo has grown leaps and bounds from pre-COVID to post-COVID. In May 2024, it had an average of 643 daily domestic departures from the four airports for which OTP is counted. This number stood at 590 pre COVID and 633 in May 2023. The seats on offer has also increased with 103,188 daily seats on offering February 2019 compared to 124,930 seats now, shows data shared by Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

What does that mean? IndiGo had an average of little over 160 delayed departures each day from the four metro airports. This translates into over 30,000 passengers who are impacted daily by IndiGo alone.

How is the data measured?

While India has over 100 operational airports, the DGCA releases the data measured at four private airports – Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad — to arrive at an average before releasing it to the public. The flip side of the data is that flights which neither originate nor terminate at any of these four airports are not published.

Typically, a larger network means - more connecting passengers and a delayed flight means further chaos in the network, in terms of rebooking or holding flights. What has also changed over the years is the security apparatus not allowing ramp to ramp transfer for connecting passengers, leading to potential delays.

Delays beyond two hours are disproportionate

In May 2024, 46902 passengers of IndiGo experienced delays of over two hours, shows the data released by the regulator. Last year this number was 51,865. Interestingly, Air India which is much smaller than IndiGo when it comes to domestic operations saw 50,605 domestic passengers impacted by delays of over two hours in May 2024. SpiceJet which is nearly as similar in size as Akasa Air saw 26,184 passengers impacted by delays beyond two hours while Akasa Air saw only 3715 passengers who were impacted.

Tail Note

How is IndiGo reacting to it? Going by the numbers, it looks like it isn’t. In 2009, the airline came up with a TVC focused on being “on time”. The TVC, in which the airline tried to portray that it runs like a well-oiled machine, got plenty of traction. “On-time is a wonderful thing” was the central message of that commercial.

Marred by groundings, high utilisation of aircraft and stretched with infrastructure issues, the airline has not made efforts to rise up the OTP charts, now occupied by Akasa Air in six of the last seven months. Akasa Air has much lower utilisation but it has 55.8% of its flights which originate at one of the four airports, compared to 37.6% of IndiGo - making the tracking percentage much higher.

The “On-Time is a wonderful thing” advertisement ends on a nationalistic mode – “When we get our work done on time, we become the world’s most powerful economy “on-time”. The promise of an on-time landing continued in its next advertisement in 2011, when the airline launched a broad-way style musical at the time of starting international flights.

As it prepares for induction of widebody aircraft in 2027, it will have passengers connecting not just from the length and breadth of the country but also from across oceans and that means more complex operations than what they are today.