Parking challenge for fast-expanding airlines

Indian airlines await the delivery of nearly 1,500 aircraft over the next 7 to 12 years.

Indian airlines await the delivery of nearly 1,500 aircraft over the next 7 to 12 years. But at half that fleet size today, they often grapple with parking challenges for their aircraft.

Two of the biggest airports in Delhi and Mumbai have a combined parking capacity of 364 aircraft for the nearly 700 planes, among various airlines.

Recent orders of 500 aircraft by IndiGo and 470 by Air India, along with a three-digit order by Akasa, mean that by the end of the decade, when a large chunk of these planes arrive, the expansion of airport capacity will have to keep pace with space for parking these planes.

With 233 parking stands in Delhi for narrowbody and widebody planes (according to Aeronautical Informational Publication) and 131 for narrowbodies in Mumbai, an airline executive said that airlines such as Air India, IndiGo and Vistara, that control 85% of the market share, are able to avail only about half the parking capacity of what they would like to have in order to be able to plan all their flights in a commercially viable manner.

The lack of night parking stands often forces airlines to fly the last flight of the day to smaller cities such as Ahmedabad (alternative airport for Mumbai) and Lucknow (alternative for Delhi), which are unlikely to record high seat occupancy or command as high airfares at those hours as they would on metro-to-metro flights.

“These are some of the forced measures we use and are an additional financial burden on the airline as only the most price-sensitive customers will opt for such flights,” said an executive in the network planning team of an airline.

Alternatively, airlines also deploy their aircraft for overnight flights to Gulf countries by scheduling a late-evening departure and an early-morning arrival.