Airlines in India report fall in domestic passengers in August

The number of domestic passengers using scheduled Indian airlines fell marginally to 3.99 million in August 2010 from 4.08 million in the previous month.

For the January-August 2010 period, however, the number of passengers carried by domestic airlines rose 19.3 per cent to 33.91 million against 28.42 million in the corresponding period of 2009, an official release said.

Kingfisher carried the highest number of passengers for an individual carrier at 7.97 lakh while Jet Airways carried 7.79 lakh passengers, Air India (domestic) 7.30 lakh passengers, IndiGo 6.56 lakh passengers, Spice Jet 5.02 lakh passengers, Jet Lite 2.99 lakh passengers and Go Air 2.26 lakh passengers.

Jet Airways had 19.5 per cent of the market share while its sister carrier Jet Lite had a 7.5 per cent share. Kingfisher had 20 per cent of the market, Air India (domestic) 18.3 per cent, IndiGo 16.4 per cent, Spice Jet 12.6 per cent and Go Air 5.7 per cent.

Kingfisher Airlines reported the highest seat capacity utilisation of 80.9 per cent in August 2010, followed by IndiGo 74.5 per cent, JetLite 73.2 per cent, Go Air 72.0 per cent, Jet Airways 70.4 per cent, Spice Jet 70.3 per cent and Air India (domestic) 65.5 per cent.

An analysis of capacity and demand data has indicated that the trend of increase in both capacity and demand continued in August 2010 as well on an year-on-year basis, the release added.