Airlines in India have over 650 aircraft in scheduled commercial service. IndiGo is the market leader with around 213 aircraft in its fleet, followed by Air India, Jet Airways, SpiceJet, GoAir, Vistara and AirAsia India. Then there are airlines flying regional aircraft only like Alliance Air, TurboJet, Star Air and Zoom Air. There is also Air India Express, whose focus market is South India – Middle East, apart from a few other routes.

Airlines in India added 131 aircraft in 2018 and the same growth rate is expected this year also. But the Indian market is tough and many airlines are facing financial issue whereas some are facing a pilot crisis. Owing to this, IndiGo cancelled flights a few weeks ago, and Jet Airways cancelled flights, and are continuing to cancel flights at the moment as well. Are all airline utilising all aircraft in their fleet? I went about to find out. The first thing to report back, the aircraft currently on the ground is more than the size of SpiceJet which is the fourth largest carrier in India by fleet size.

GoAir

GoAir began its journey back in 2005 around the same time as IndiGo. GoAir, unlike IndiGo, lacked a strong management team, a consistent CEO (more than 6 CEOs changed flipped) and a proper strategy. They have since been doing just one job, existing, rather than growing. GoAir took the longest time to go international since it didn’t take any new aircraft deliveries, for a long time and was below the threshold of 20 aircraft for years.

Then, GoAir took rapid deliveries of many A320neo aircraft, and now has more A320neos (30) than A320ceos (17) in its fleet of 47 aircraft. It has a further 114 A320neo on order. But at least 3 new A320neo aircraft have been transferred to Toulouse Francazal airport for long-term storage: VT-WGU, VT-WJG and VT-WJH with no new deliveries since December 28, 2018. GoAir also has 8 aircraft on the ground with no scheduled flights to be operated by them.

I asked around, and while there were no firm answers forthcoming, it came down to a lack of strategy. To have 8 aircraft on ground and 3 in long term storage, it meant they did not have places to go. GoAir planned to add 10 cities to Phuket, but we have not seen any action after Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore. Clearly, GoAir has no pricing power on these flights, given they are in a fight with IndiGo. That is why people are rubbing their hands in glee with getting tickets Bangalore to Phuket for INR 10K for two people.

Jet Airways

Jet Airways is cancelling flights as aircraft are being grounded due to lack of parts and are being repossessed by lessors. Jet Airways also underwent a network realignment earlier this month which reduced aircraft requirement. So apart from scheduled redelivery, lessors are grounding aircraft as lease payments haven’t come through and no new Boeing 737 Max are being delivered currently which has led to aircraft shortage and cancellations.

We covered Jet Airways network changes in the following posts.

• Jet Airways massive International route consolidation coming December 2018
• Reading into Jet Airways Q3 Results 2018
• Jet Airways Middle-East Network changes
• Jet Airways Domestic Route network being cut back
• Jet Airways’ shutting down another 7 stations including 4 North-East stations

Apart from this, Jet Airways has shut down its ATR base at Bengaluru. Jet Airways used to operate ATR 72-500 on Bengaluru – Mangalore, Bengaluru – Chennai and Bengaluru – Hyderabad routes. While Jet Airways is now operating only 1 Boeing 737 daily flights on Bengaluru-Chennai, it has stopped operations on Bengaluru – Mangalore and Bengaluru – Hyderabad route. Jet Airways will restart Bengaluru -Hyderabad with 2x daily Boeing 737 flights from March 31, 2019, and increase Bengaluru – Chennai to 3x daily Boeing 737 flights from March 31, 2019.

Jet Airways has grounded all its 5 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Currently, the following Jet Airways aircraft are on the ground.

Of course, there is a new spate of cancellations since yesterday, due to operational reasons. It is estimated that 60 flights are cancelled just today on the Jet Airways network. As many as 46 aircraft are grounded, and we have not been able to find out one aircraft here. Also, some are on their redelivery process to the lessors at the moment, leading to a fleet shrinkage.

Jet Airways has 46% of its 119 aircraft fleet on the ground currently.

IndiGo

IndiGo is having a huge pilot crisis at the moment. There is a mismatch in terms of the number of captains to the number of first officers and also pilots to aircraft ratio. IndiGo is blaming slow induction process of expat pilots for this and they are expected to be back on track by April.

There have been mass cancellations and last week aircraft were spotted at Bangalore and Hyderabad as if they haven’t moved for a while. However, aircraft haven’t been grounded per se, and a lot of them are operating one flight a day sometimes. IndiGo has reduced aircraft utilisation which is a bit tough to crack manually with 213 aircraft in operation.  Also, it seems they have a whole lot more of their pilots heading to airlines in the middle-east, but this is just hear say at the moment.

IndiGo plans to take an aircraft every week just like last year. Hope they will avoid such a situation in future.

Air India

Air India is also financially unstable. It has a huge debt. Couple that with poor aircraft utilisation on the back of long periods of maintenance and poor upkeep of aircraft. Many Air India aircraft including some Boeing 777-300ERs and Boeing 787-8s haven’t flown for more than six months. Same is the situations with a couple of A319 and A321. We have actively covered Air India’s aircraft utilisation and groundings in the following posts.

• Air India’s terrible fleet utilisation & golden codeshare opportunity missed?
• Grounded Air India A321s will be back in the air by December 2018?

While a couple of A319s are scheduled to operate flights from March 1, 2019, they have had an interesting flight schedule since November 2018. The go-to answer for this poor utilisations has always been,

Not enough money for spares. Aircraft will be operational soon.

Air India hasn’t had a net addition of aircraft for quite some time now. The newly delivered A320neos replaced the ~24-year-old double boggy A320s. Yet Air India continues to operate a 24.4-year-old double boggy A320 (VT-ESL). Interestingly, Air India had planned to retire all the double bogeys by December 2018 and the last one VT-ESL was stored in October 2018. VT-ESL has since been recalled to operate scheduled flights.

One would naturally expect Air India to bring back A319s and A321s to service but I guess they have something else in mind. Hopefully, with Ashwani Lohani back as the CEO of Air India, things will improve.

SpiceJet, Alliance Air and Air India Express

SpiceJet is carrying out normal operations so is Alliance Air and Air India Express. A few aircraft are out for maintenance and a few have been damaged due to an accident. Here is a list of all the aircraft currently on the ground.

India is one of the fastest growing aviation markets, but clearly, we are running out strategy, destinations and manpower and the money to continue with this explosive growth. It has now shown cracks. The high cost of operations and low yields coupled with a highly competitive environment are eating away profits. New entrants, on the other hand, have slot and rules constraints which are hampering growth as well as profitability. Infrastructure constraints and manpower shortage are also taking a toll.

What are your thoughts on this massive number of aircraft grounded across India?