Will Domestic Flights Bounce Back To Full Capacity By Summer Of 2021? This Is What Govt Is Saying

After months of nationwide lockdown, the airlines were finally opened for traveling across the nation and in most parts of the world. But the flights are still flying with partial occupancy. However, on Friday, Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Hardeep Singh Puri, revealed that the domestic air traffic can be expected to swing back to its original occupancy by this year’s summer.

What Did The Civil Aviation Minister say?

While addressing the ‘India Aircraft Leasing Summit’ at New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan Puri he assured that the government is positive about making India a center for aircraft leasing for both domestic and international markets.

He highlighted that the condition of domestic airlines is almost back to the pre-COVID-19 level as the government has been able to “navigate the pandemic turbulence”.

“If a mutation or variant of the virus comes in, by the time we open our summer schedule by April we will have our full pre-COVID-19 level of domestic traffic or even higher,” He added.

Is the Airline Sector Recovering From Lockdown?

According to the minister, the passenger traffic has witnessed an exponential recovery from the month of July last year. However, the first quarter of 2020 was particularly hard for the sector.

Civil aviation is one of the major driving factors of a country’s economy. Few years in the last decade proved to be beneficial in terms of the country’s domestic traffic growth. In the period between  2013-14 and 2019-20, the traffic grew at a rate of 14% on average.

What Are The Future Plans Of The Indian Aviation Sector?

Puri revealed that the Indian aviation sector has a lot of potentials to grow in the next 20 years. To realize the goals India needs 1,700 to 2,100 aircrafts worth $ 290 billion. The target can be reached if around 100 aircrafts worth $5 billion are delivered to India annually.

Currently, India is the third-largest civil aviation market in domestic terms, but it is planning to be the world’s third-largest overall civil evaluation market in a very short period of time. The developments made in the last couple of year’s union budget, especially those which established MROs and financial services for aircraft leasing, is proving to provide a boost to the targets set by the Indian Aviation ministry.

The share of commercially leased aircraft surged from 2% in 1980 to 41% in 2018 and has been expected to reach 50% by the end of 2020. The growth of the Indian aviation sector can be evidently seen by the statistics.