CHENNAI:
India's monthly domestic airline traffic for April this year declined for the first time in six years when compared to the year-ago traffic, according to International Air Transport Association (IATA) which represents some 290 airlines comprising 82pc of global air traffic.
IATA said that India’s airlines’ traffic actually fell 0.5pc year-over-year, reflecting the impact of the shut-down of Jet Airways.
The reduction in flight operations of Jet Airways—which stopped flying in April has hit India's domestic aviatic sector with domestic traffic rising just 3.1 per cent in March also, down from February’s growth of 8.3pc. The dip in domestic traffic is well-off the torrid five-year average growth pace of close to 20pc per month.
This comes as IATA announced global passenger traffic results for April 2019 showing that demand (revenue passenger kilometers or RPKs) rose by 4.3pc compared to April 2018. April capacity (available seat kilometers or ASKs) increased by 3.6%, and load factor climbed 0.6 percentage point to 82.8%, which was a record for the month of April, surpassing last year’s record of 82.2pc
"Driven by tariffs and trade disputes, global trade is falling, and as a result, we are not seeing traffic growing at the same levels as a year ago. However, airlines are doing a very good job of managing aircraft utilization, leading to record load factors.” said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO.
The grounding of Jet Airways has impacted industry's capacity by as much as about 14 percent, and this has resulted in a 4.2 percent fall in domestic air traffic to 10.99 million in April
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