Recently announced Updated report of Jan-09 Indian Domestic traffic

Indian Ministry of civil aviation recently reported the total passengers carried by domestic airlines in Jan’09. The total passengers carried were 3.3 million. Air India carried 555000 passengers, Jet airways carried 596000 passengers, 241000 passengers were carried by Jet Lite, Kingfisher carried about 919000 passengers, 393000 passengers were carried by Spice jet, Go air carried about 81000 passengers and Indigo airlines carried about 457000 passengers in Jan’09.

The seat factors of domestic airlines in Jan’09 is nearly varied with each other: Indigo has 72.2% of seat factor, Spice jet about 68.3%, Jetlite 67.5%, Jet airways 64.8%, Kingfisher 64.0%, Go air 64.0% and Air India 60.2%. The report generated shows that Kingfisher airlines are ahead of others in carrying passengers and Indigo in seat factors in the month of Jan’09. The Jan’09 domestic traffic data is the result of introducing promotional flights airfares by almost all domestic airlines, report may vary a bit this month as there has been a rise in fares in Feb’09.

A new base fare of Re.1 introduced by Jetlite

As all Indian Airlines are hiking the base fares Jetlite introduced a base fare of Re.1 as a promotional fare. The fare is applied on some of Metro cities flights as well. Meanwhile Jet Airways also announced Rs.300 base fare on the flight routes to major cities. The fares will be effective from 30th April’09. Jet Lite introduced its promotional base fare as it heard about other airlines withdrawing the promotional base fares.

All airlines including Spice Jet, Indigo, Kingfisher and GoAir had a hike in their base fares; they all are now concentrating on earning revenues rather than seat factors. It was assumed that there will be a hike of Rs.1800 to Rs.2000 on the flights from Mumbai to Delhi. Air India in response to withdrawal of promotional fares said that the response was not upto the expectations, so they decided to discontinue with the promotional fares.

Hijack scare troubled Security at Delhi Airport

A mid air hijack scare created panic for the on board passengers and the airport security, when an Indigo flight was going from Goa to Delhi. The accuse was arrested and interrogated by Delhi Police on Monday after which the court has sent him to jail for 14 days. The accuse was not happy with the seat allotment and was behaving awkwardly. His behavior forced the pilot to send a hijack alert which caused the emergency landing and the plane was kept in isolation for at least two and a half hours after that.

The accuse threatened the air hostess by saying that he was armed which was the main cause of calling a hijack alert. The CISF took position outside the plane while NSG was inside, taking charge of the situation. Once the situation was under control and was confirmed that there was no hostage situation the NSG was allowed to go ahead and ask the passengers to deboard the Indigo airlines 6E44. Finally, all the passengers and airline crew were safe and the hijack was declared as fake by the NSG.