‘Domestic airlines’ capacity up at 67% in Dec’

Indian airlines have remained conservative in deploying aircraft capacity in December. Despite a cap of allowing 80 per cent of capacity, Indian aviation players have deployed only 67 per cent of the capacity. Domestic passenger traffic declined by 45 per cent on a YoY basis, according to ICRA.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) permitted increasing the capacity to 60 per cent with effect from September 02, 2020, to 70 per cent with effect from November 11, 2020 and further to 80 per cent with effect from December 03, 2020.

However, according to a recent ICRA report, which assessed MoCA’s daily updates for December stated that the capacity deployment in December 2020 was at 67 per cent (vis-a-vis December 2019) which was an increase over the 52 per cent capacity deployed in October 2020 and 59% in November 2020.

Kinjal shah, Vice-President, ICRA, said: “The PLF for December 2020 was lower than the 75 per cent in November 2020, due to the increase in capacity deployment by 17 per cent. Overall, from May 25, 2020 till December 31, 2020, domestic passenger traffic has been pegged at 29.9 million.This comes even as December generally has a good PLF.