Air Traffic in India

Indians are flying in droves.




In 2006, domestic airlines alone ferried over 16 million passengers. Hence, the high growth in civil aviation sector is to be sustained, it would call for improvement of infrastructure facilities on several fronts. The projection for Indian Airports for 2020 is estimated at:

  • 100 million passengers
  • Including 60 million domestic passengers
  • Cargo in the range of 3.4 million tones per annum

Growing fastest in Asia, in terms of flight operations, the rise in domestic capacity in October 2006 was 46%. The capacity in terms of international deployment increased by 14% in the same period. This substantial rise is a direct effect of the low cost fares that have changed the face of the Indian civil aviation sector. In India, demand for low-cost travel has skyrocketed, with domestic flight operations in this segment showing an increase of 466%.

But has this been without problems ? No.

In fact Air travel is tuning into a nightmare.
It's all about being jostled by the crowds at airports, standing in serpentine queues for security check, flights taking off behind schedule, aircraft holding over airports for anything between 20-40 minutes before landing and, worse of all, missing connecting flights. With the opening up of the civil aviation sector, the number of airlines in operation—including no-frills, low-cost carriers—have gone up substantially. But infrastructure at the airports in the country has not been strengthened to any commensurate degree so as to handle the growing passenger and aircraft load.

Now that's alarming!


Comments

Popular Posts