Mumbai: Unlike other metros, Mumbai with its congested single-runway airport offered a rather poor choice of direct flights to several Tier-II cities, pre-pandemic.
With new work, travel and leisure trends in the past one year, though, flights to non-metros have become increasingly prominent on the city airport’s radar.
Till July this year, 64% of the passengers who passed through Mumbai airport were travelling to or returning from a non-metro on a direct flight, said a Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) spokesperson.
After the lull in domestic travel brought on by the due to Covid-19 second wave in summer, non-metro routes are back this month with the launch of four weekly direct flights from Mumbai to Bareilly and the relaunch of 18 weekly direct flights to Tier-II cities of Ajmer, Porbandar, Tirupati and Vishakhapatnam. Last month, Gwalior had joined Mumbai airport’s direct flight list.“Between January and July, Mumbai airport handled over 75 lakh domestic passengers, of whom over 48 lakh were flying to or from about 60 non-metros,” said a Mumbai International Airport ltd (MIAL) spokesperson.
These included leisure travellers and passengers flying between home and their work city as is evident from the top three non-metro destinations out of Mumbai during this period—Goa, Ahmedabad and Varanasi, that is. But metro airports were the traffic kingpins with the overall top three domestic destinations out of Mumbai being Delhi, Goa and Bengaluru.
Kapil Kaul of Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, an aviation consultancy firm said, “Non-metro to metro routes are increasingly seeing more flight deployment during COVID. Prior to Covid, flight operations from Mumbai, especially to non-metros were significantly constrained due to capacity shortage.”
14/08/21 Times of India
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