Domestic air passenger traffic was back to the growth trajectory in June amid the falling number of COVID-19 cases in the country with around three million passengers flying on local routes in the previous month as against around two million in May, a report said on Tuesday.
Though there is some recovery observed in June, stress on demand continues, driven largely by the second wave of the pandemic, limiting travel to only necessary travel, credit rating agency ICRA said in its report.
On a sequential basis, domestic passenger traffic was up 41-42 per cent in June over May. The domestic passenger volume, however, rose 51 per cent on a year-on-year basis, it stated.
June 2020 was the full month of operations after domestic commercial flights were recommenced on May 25 following a nearly two-month ban amid the nationwide lockdown in late-March last year.
It has now permitted increasing the capacity to 65 per cent with effect from July 5 and which will remain applicable up to July 31.
For June 2021, domestic passenger traffic stood at around 29-30 lakh, implying a sequential growth of around 41-42 per cent as compared with around 19.8 lakh in May 2021, ICRA said in the report.
The airlines’ capacity deployment in May, which was reduced to 50 per cent from 80 per cent earlier following a government order, was around 46 per cent higher at around 31,700 departures, than 21,696 departures in June 2020, it stated.
On a sequential basis, the number of departures in June were higher by around 14-15 per cent, as coronavirus infections demonstrated a downward trajectory, ICRA added.
“For June 2021, the average daily departures were at around 1,100, significantly higher than average daily departures of around 700 in June 2020, and higher than around 900 in May 2021, though remains significantly lower than around 2,000 in April 2021,” said Kinjal Shah, vice-president and co-group head at ICRA.
She added that…