Aviation has been in a not-so-happy sector to be for a couple of months or so, with the business of keeping people moving to stay at home itself for the months gone by. So, I have been curiously watching as aviation has re-opened this past week about how it has been growing. My personal thoughts have been, only people who need to fly will fly right now, given the absolutely large requirements of quarantine for people at this point of time, including on inter-state travel.

I have been collating the daily departure numbers since May 25, 2020, and it looks like a very bleak picture at this point of time. Have a look at this graph.

To give you context, in February 2020, 1.24 crore passengers flew on domestic flights. So, if I annualise the number of passengers flown in May 2020, I come to a number much closer to the number of passengers flown in February 2020. Which basically means if we flew approximately 80 passengers per flight departure (45% loads) in a year ahead, we would have flown as many people in a whole year as we flew in February 2020.

The more worrying part is these numbers were spread across airlines, including IndiGo, Vistara, Air India, SpiceJet, TruJet, StarAir and AirAsia India. GoAir is starting operations again, only today. Not just that, most aircraft out of the 650 aircraft in India are not even up in the air at the moment. And this was the pent up demand, which means, at some point in time in the coming days, these numbers could dip further.

To add to that, there are price caps on tickets, which means airlines can’t start to lower fares to stimulate demand at the moment, as irresponsible it may sound for now.

Bottomline

The lockdown in India is now moving to opening-up strategy. But would this mean people would jump at the opportunity to fly? Major corporations already want employees to work from home for the time being, and these orders will hold for another few months at least.

When do you think air travel is coming back then? Don’t worry, it is as good as my guess for now. 

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