Summary
- The article discusses the on-time performance (OTP) of airlines in India, with Akasa Air and IndiGo emerging as the top performers.
- Akasa and IndiGo have been consistently neck-and-neck in terms of punctuality, with Akasa taking the lead in the months of March, April, and May.
- Akasa has achieved an impressive OTP of 100% on certain days in March, demonstrating their commitment to maintaining high standards of operational efficiency.
The monthly reports by India’s aviation regulator, the DGCA, give crucial insights into the ongoing patterns and trends within the sector. With June’s data in, we now have numbers and figures, painting a picture of what the first half of the year looked like. And one crucial pattern that has emerged is the on-time performance of airlines, which was dominated by Akasa Air and IndiGo.
Parameters
Before we dig deeper into the on-time performance (OTP) analysis of Akasa Air and IndiGo, let’s first look at how the DGCA computes these figures. India has hundreds of airports, with all airlines operating multiple flights nationwide. To calculate the OTP, DGCA observes the airline schedules of four metro airports – Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.
Photo: BoeingMan777/Shutterstock
According to OAG, an airline is considered to be “on time” if it has a departure or arrival that occurs within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. OTP can be used as one of the key metrics for potential service differentiators, allowing airlines to market themselves as having a better product and giving passengers an idea about the operational efficiency of carriers.
Akasa was first, IndiGo was a close second
While the OTPs of airlines keep fluctuating, from January to June this year, two airlines have emerged better than others – Akasa Air and IndiGo. In Fact, in five out of the last six months, the top OTP spot was taken by either Akasa or IndiGo.
The two airlines have been neck-and-neck in terms of punctuality, with IndiGo coming out on top for the first two months of 2023. In January, IndiGo had an OTP of 84.6, and in February, 88.8. Interestingly, Akasa held the second spot in both these months with OTPs of 76.9 and 87.0, respectively.
Photo: Anand G Iyer/Shutterstock
The next three months, however, were dominated by Akasa, which recorded OTPs for March, April, and May as 94.2, 94.0, and 92.6, respectively. IndiGo was a close second in March and May, with OTPs of 92.0 and 90.3, respectively. Even in June, when Vistara emerged as the OTP winner, Akasa and IndiGo were a joint second at 87.6.
Akasa had an excellent run in March in which, on three days of the month (1st, 22nd, and 28th), it did not even have a single delay, achieving an OTP of 100%. Neelu Khatri, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President (Operations) of Akasa Air commented in March,
“We routinely run time and motion studies to ensure that our processes run with stability, and we train our employees to deliver on these processes with precision. Furthermore, to maintain these stringent standards that we have set for ourselves, we continuously analyze complex operations data to identify improvements that we can make to our processes.”
Photo: Akasa Air
While Akasa beat IndiGo in the first half of 2023 in punctuality, it also had the advantage of operating at a much smaller scale than IndiGo, which has more than 300 aircraft. Hopefully, as Akasa increases the size of its fleet and network in the coming months, it’ll also be able to sustain its timely departures.
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