Domestic airlines flew 95.52 lakh passengers in December last year, an increase of almost 24 per cent over the 77.09 lakh passengers carried in December 2015.

The latest data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation shows that IndiGo flew 38.48 lakh passengers in December last year retaining its position as market leader in terms of maximum number of passengers carried by a single airline in a month. Jet Airways took the second spot having carried 14.60 lakh passengers followed by Air India (13.35 lakh passengers) and SpiceJet (12.10 lakh passengers).

SpiceJet reported the highest passenger load factor of 93.7 per cent among the domestic carriers followed by IndiGo (91.4 per cent), GoAir (90.7 per cent), AirAsia India (86.3 per cent) and Jet Airways (86.1 per cent). Passenger load factor shows how many of the total seats on offer by each airline are getting filled.

The industry paid a whopping ₹ 4.49 crore as compensation to over 3.28 lakh passengers affected by denied board, cancellations and delays. Of these over 3 lakh passengers were affected by delays for which airlines paid a cumulative amount of ₹ 1.76 crore for providing facilities to passengers affected by delays.

Indian law stipulates that airlines pay compensation starting from ₹2,000 going up to ₹4,000 for flights which are delayed or cancelled.

The law also stipulates that a compensation of ₹2,000 be paid for flights having a block time of one-hour while the compensation is ₹4,000 for flights having a block time of two hours or more. Block time is determined from the time between the first movement of an aircraft from its parking position at the departure airport in order to manoeuvre to the runway for takeoff until the wheels are standing still again at the destination airport and all engines are shut down.

The compensation is only paid if the cost of the ticket is higher than the compensation amount.

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