Mumbai airport passenger traffic soars 100 pct to 48.50 mn

According to official data released recently, passenger air traffic at Mumbai Airport in the past eleven years has increased by over 100 per cent including both, domestic and international passengers. From overall passenger air traffic of 22.25 million in 2006-07, numbers have risen to 48.50 million by the end of 2017-18.

The Mumbai Airport remains to be the most bottlenecked single-runway airport raising concerns for the aviation sector. Image source: PTI

According to official data released recently, passenger air traffic at Mumbai Airport in the past eleven years has increased by over 100 per cent including both, domestic and international passengers. From overall passenger air traffic of 22.25 million in 2006-07, numbers have risen to 48.50 million by the end of 2017-18.

Mumbai Airport is the second busiest airport in the country handling more than 900 flights daily. The airport has already crossed its original carrying capacity, while it handled 48.50 million passengers in the last fiscal.

According to Mumbai International Airport Limited’s (MIAL) data, the domestic passenger traffic stood at 34.85 million in 2017-18 whereas in 2006-7 it stood at 14.90 million.

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In case of international passengers traffic, the volume stood at 13.65 million during 2017-18 whereas in 2006-07 it was 7.35 million. MIAL data indicates that major increase in traffic took place post 2013-14 when the annual traffic was 32.22 million, that increased by around 17 million by 2017-18 taking the traffic at around 48.50 million. This probably began after terminal-2 (T-2) was functional around that time.

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The Mumbai Airport also claims that the comprehensive airport growth rate in passenger traffic is 6.5 per cent between 2009-10 and 2017-18 followed by air traffic movement (ATM) being at 3.3 per cent within the same period.

In these 10 years, the runway occupancy time (ROT), too, has reduced to around 15 seconds. It was around 65 seconds but has now been brought down to around 49-50 seconds. ROT is the duration of time required for a particular aircraft to land or take-off. ROT impacts the runway’s capacity and at times even small reductions in the average time and aircraft spend on the runway can possibly have a impact on the overall runway capacity.

The Mumbai Airport also remains to be the most bottlenecked single-runway airport raising concerns for the aviation sector. It is only after the Navi Mumbai International Airport is functional that the additional and further increasing passenger capacity of the airport will be incorporated. However, MIAL claims that the capacity can be stretched up to 60 million when it comes to Mumbai Airport.

Meanwhile, to tackle this passenger traffic, Mumbai Airport operator MIAL claims to have increased the number of check-in counters, security check screenings, increasing the number of immigration counters followed by self-bag tag printing and self-bag drop facility to avoid the queues for saving time.

By Mehul R Thakkar, DNA India

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