Domestic flights in India allowed to operate at 100% capacity starting today

As per the Ministry of Civil Aviation announcement, airlines can operate domestic flights in full capacity from today, October 18. The Civil Aviation Ministry had earlier released a statement permitting the restoration of the scheduled domestic air operations without any restrictions. The resumption of domestic flights comes after a year-and-half hiatus following the outbreak of COVID in 2020.

According to an earlier order issued by the ministry, all domestic flights were allowed to operate with 85 per cent capacity of their pre-COVID domestic services from September 18. Now, the ministry has lifted all restrictions. The restrictions placed earlier saw airlines operate with 50 per cent capacity as of June 1. The capacity was raised to 65 per cent on July 25 and further increased to 72.5 per cent on August 12. The flight operations had restarted last year on May 25 at 33 per cent capacity after being completely shut due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Allowing the resumption of airlines with no restrictions on capacity, the ministry informed that all companies doing services must adhere to the guidelines issued by the government. Airline companies and airport operators must "ensure guidelines to contain the spread of COVID-19 are strictly adhered to and Covid-appropriate behaviour is strictly enforced", the Jyotiraditya Scindia led ministry said in its order. Meanwhile, restrictions like minimum and maximum fare caps and no serving or selling of meals in less than 2-hours of the journey will continue in place.

Domestic air passenger traffic grows 2-3% in September 

The ICRA data released recently showed that India's domestic air passenger traffic saw growth in September. The credits rating agency said that domestic air passenger traffic grew marginally 2-3% at around 69 lakh in September, PTI reported. The local carrier operated higher capacity at 54% in September 2021 over the same period last year.

In September, airlines witnessed around 61,100 departures as compared to 39,628 departures in the same month of 2020. "For September 2021, average daily departures were at around 2,100, significantly higher than the average daily departures of around 1,321 in September 2020, and higher than around 1,900 in August 2021, though they remained lower than around 2,200 in January 2021," said Suprio Banerjee, Vice President and Sector Head, Icra.

COVID cases in India

India reported 14,146 fresh COVID cases on Sunday, the lowest single-day rise in 229 days. With this, the total COVID tally has reached 3,40,67,719 the health minister informed. According to the latest health bulletin, 5,786 people have recovered from COVID taking total active cases to 1,95,846. 144 individuals have also succumbed to the infection.

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