As passenger load rises, flight cancellations dip to 2.6% in Sept

MUMBAI: Close to 59,000 passengers were affected due to domestic flight cancellations by private airlines between June and September, shows data from the DGCA. The good news is that cancellations as a percentage of all flights has been reducing — from 3.8% in May to 2.6% in September. However, the possibility of domestic flights being cancelled at the last moment due to poor passenger load continues to be a matter of concern.
In fact, empty seats on flights is one of the images that have come to define domestic air travel during the pandemic. When domestic flights restarted in May, for every seat that was occupied, one remained empty. Since then, passenger cabins have been slowing filling up. In September, the average passenger load on India’s domestic flights touched 63%.
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By comparison, last September, the average passenger load across airlines was 85%. Currently, airlines have been operating fewer than half the number of flights they operated last year. Between May and September last year, airlines cancelled an average of only 1% of their scheduled flights. This year, during the same period, the flight cancellations averaged about 4%.