Delays and Mumbai airport have become synonymous these days. While social media points to frequent delays for flights at Mumbai, numbers released by the regulator back them up. The second busiest airport in the country has been operating at peak capacity almost all the time for the last few years, barring the COVID period.
Early this year, the government in its previous term had mandated flight cuts at Mumbai to better the On Time Performance. While the numbers are slightly better this October, there is no respite in sight at least till the navi Mumbai airport is operational.
Data shared by Cirium – an aviation analytics company, for the first week of December shows that a typical Sunday sees Mumbai handle 455 departures and an equal number of airlines. That makes 910 air traffic movements from scheduled commercial operations. Add the non-scheduled operations to the mix and the airport regularly handles close to 950 air traffic movements, with its record handling being above 1000 in a 24 hour period.
Mumbai the laggard
In October, IndiGo had the highest On-Time Performance amongst all carriers in India at 71.9% at the top four metro airports for domestic services. However, only 55.4% of flights were on-time at Mumbai. The airport remained the lowest for OTP amongst the four metro airports for Air India, Vistara, Akasa Air and SpiceJet as well.
The airport is the busiest single-runway airport in the world and has challenges like no other. A single runway, two terminals, continuous upgradation and maintenance, andgrounded planes occupying bays are just a handful of reasons for the delays.
The fault is not entirely with the airport, airlines have varied block times for flights on the same sector and end up arriving early in the morning hours. The airport, which calibrates slots based on capacity, then sees a surge, which, when handled, leads to delays in subsequent hours, leading to a mismatch. While these mismatches never occur at smaller airports where both runway and apron capacity are aplenty, Mumbai is congested on all counts, and the airport has to go out of its way to ensure smooth operations.
This puts a strain on resources, leading to delays creeping in. Passengers often complain of having boarded the aircraft and not pushed back for departure with airlines passing the buck to the airport for not allowing closing of doors and pushback. This is largely done by the Air Traffic Control team which is busy handling arrivals and prior departures. This leads to a cascading delay like no other. For a busy airport, without any lean periods, there is no way to recover if the delays get bigger with each passing hour.
The Air Traffic Control is manned and operated by Airports Authority of India (AAI) and it has been trying its best to add resources in an environment where multiple new airports have opened up over the last few years, stretching its resources. Air Traffic Control Operations is a complex and skilled job and only experienced controllers can be posted at airports like Mumbai for its scale and complexity.
In Navi Mumbai the solution?
In Summer next year, Navi Mumbai airport will be operational. Unlike Noida, the airport is very much in the metropolitan region and has good road connectivity to begin with. With both the airports under the same operator, will some flights be shifted to Navi Mumbai? This will give breathers to the current airport.
This will be the right balance in terms of not compromising capacity for the city and yet ensuring that the existing airport improves on the On Time Performance parameters.
Tail Note
With the fog season fast approaching, flights to and from Delhi along with few other airports will be impacted drastically in the days to come. This will further put strain on Mumbai airport and two biggest airports in disarray at the same time can spell disaster for airline operations and passengers.
Adani Enterprises, in its investor presentation has listed out how Mumbai performs better than benchmark in Immigration, Check-in as well as security check queue. There are no benchmarks for On Time Performance, but it is time that the airport along with the airlines plan out steps to improve the passenger experience at all costs.