Nearly 1000 flights a day, but has Mumbai's CSI airport improved in on-time performance?

Key Highlights

• CSIA handled arrival and departure of 969 flights in a single day.
• The airport aims to cross 1,000 aircraft movements.
• Nearly 40% of both arrivals and departures were delayed at the CSIA, Mumbai in October.

The Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) at Mumbai reached a new record of handling 969 flights in a day on Saturday. What is not known is how many of those flights departed or arrived on time.

The airport used to previously close in on 935 flights, a report by Times of India said.

"We hope to cross 1,000 aircraft movements per day soon,'' a Mumbai International Airport Ltd official said.

It has also been named in the league of a busy single-runway airport category, the report added.

CSIA works on single-runway operations in that it has just two runways which intersect each other and hence only one can be used at a time.

However majority of flight traffic in India is directed toward metro cities. And these airports have been positively bursting at the seams.

Untimely flight operations cannot only be attributed to airlines that register a higher OTP in other metro cities than in Mumbai.

On–time performance of airlines like Vistara, IndiGo, Go Air, Spicejet, Air India, Jet Airways and Jet Lite was the worst at Mumbai airport, as per Directorate General of Civil Aviation data for October.

Reasons for delay were analysed by the DGCA as mostly attributed to ‘reactionary,’ with 63% of all flights being delayed due to this reason.

Source: DGCA

International Air Transport Association (IATA) defines reactionary reasons as late arrival of aircraft from another flight or previous sector.

It also includes passenger or load connection, awaiting load or passengers from another flight, protection of stranded passengers onto a new flight, check-in error, aircraft rotation, cabin crew rotation, operations control, rerouting, diversion, consolidation, aircraft change for reasons other than technical, industrial action within own airline and industrial action outside own airline.

The CSI airport that sees close to 50 landings or take-offs in a span of one hour has a flight congestion issue which has been around for a decade now.

Out of 9930 departures in October, 37% or 3636 flights were delayed as per CSIA data for the month.

There were 9939 arrivals during the same month out of which 36% or 3577 flights were delayed.

Mumbai airport was also rated ‘the world’s worst for timely arrivals,’ along with Delhi in an article by Forbes dated January 14, 2008.

Now with the increasing passenger traffic from the country who are adopting to air transport faster than ever before, industry experts cite ‘trebling’ capital expenditure and airport capacity.

“The country would need to nearly treble its airports capacity (terminal building capacity) at an estimated capital expenditure of Rs 2.4 lakh crore in the next ten years, much higher than around Rs 52,000 crore incurred over the last decade, to address the growing air traffic,” ICRA said in a report dated October 9.