Mumbai, Dec 17 :
Air India’s narrow-body pilots union ICPA has blamed capacity deficiency vis–vis competitors for its plunging domestic market share while seeking a long-term plan for aircraft fleet expansion at the carrier.
In a letter to Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu last week, the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) also lamented that while other domestic carriers have placed huge aircraft order with both Airbus and Boeing, Air India will be inducting only five planes in its fleet going forward.
“We have remained quite stagnant in the domestic market. We still continue to operate 350-odd daily flights on domestic routes from about 300 flights 10 years ago…The load factor across all Air India flights is very high, but market share is slipping for want of additional capacity,” the ICPA said.
On the contrary, budget carrier IndiGo has scaled up its operations to over 1,000 flights per day in over 10-year period, it pointed out in the December 10 letter to Prabhu.
According to ICPA, Air India’s market share dropped from 19.8 per cent in January 2014 to just 11.8 per cent in September this year, which incidentally is the lowest market share ever for the carrier. The Gurugram-based no-frills IndiGo currently commands over 40 per cent of the total domestic passenger traffic.
Propelled initially by the low jet fuel prices and later excess capacity on local routes, the domestic passengers’ travel demand has been witnessing double digit growth since August 2014.
“All the private carriers together have hundreds of aircraft on order to keep themselves at par with the demand of ever growing domestic aviation market with a futuristic view of at least the next decade,” the ICPA said.
