Apr 11, 2017: The growth of India Aviation has continued by gaining the fourth position in air traffic ranking by IATA. According to reports, the country saw the fourth highest number of passengers taking off in 2016, up two places from the previous year overtaking UK and Brazil.
The top three markets the US, China and Japan, remained unchanged. According to a recent report published in an English daily India had 13.1 crores passengers taking off including domestic, international and connecting flights last year. Globally IATA says, 380 crore passengers took off last year up from 350 crores in 2015.
India will soon be at the third spot in terms of number of passengers taking off by overtaking Japan. In total passenger terms, India saw 15.2 crore passengers flying in 2016, with 9.9 crores flying within the country and 5.3 internationally.
IATA's take-off numbers are at 13.1 crores as it includes 9.9 crore domestic flyers, 2.7 crore people flying out of India and only a part of the 2.6 crore international flyers coming to India, who took off to take more flights last year.
India is witnessing 20 percent air traffic rose on a month-on-month basis for almost two years now. However, due to this increase growth rate, there is an infra crunch, especially in the busy metro airports. Air traffic congestion has made hovering over common at Delhi and Mumbai. These two airports hardly have any free slots available for new flights, with Mumbai completely choked.
According to CAPA, India had become the third largest domestic air travel market globally. More people are flying here within the country than Japan. Last year in Japan the number of people flying within the country was 9.7 crore were as India saw a drastic growth around 9.7 crores replacing Japan from its position.