There have been umpteen customer complaints over the last couple of days on the state of affairs at the Delhi airport, which is also the largest in the country.
Not surprisingly, the rise in complaints coincided with the increase in domestic passengers, with their numbers reaching a post-COVID high on Sunday. In fact, Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia paid a surprise visit to Terminal 3 in Delhi on Sunday.
Though passenger complaints are restricted to a few hours of the day and not a 24-hour problem, they can lead to a cascading effect.
X'mas vacations are round the corner and NRIs are making a beeline for India, possibly for the first time since 2019. With the next couple of days expected to add more passengers per day, problems are bound to increase.
What should passengers do?
If you have not booked a flight yet in the peak season, book a flight during non-peak hours.
Airports clearly have peaks and troughs. So, make the most of non-peak times. Sometimes, it comes with the added advantage of relatively cheaper fares.
If you are already booked on a flight that is departing from T3 at Delhi, keep a watch on airline advisories and ensure that you have updated your contact details with the airline.
With the likelihood of flights shifting from T3 to other terminals, it is important that airlines can reach you.
Which are the peak hours in Delhi and how are operations split?
Data shared by UK-headquartered global travel data provider OAG Aviation, exclusively for this article, shows that Delhi handles maximum departures between 0530 and 0600 hours.
The 30-minute window sees 27 departures on Sundays - the peak day of the week, in terms of departures. The second-highest is between 1730 and 1800 hours, which see 23 departures.
There are many 30-minute time bands with 21 departures. These are the 0600 - 0630, 0730 - 0800, 0930 - 1000, 1030 - 1100, and the 1330-1400 bands.
Clearly, complaints start to pour in from early in the day itself, as seen on social media.
The complaints in Delhi are mainly related to the award-winning Terminal 3. It is the only terminal that handles both domestic and international flights.
Go First and Akasa Air operate only from T2, SpiceJet operates from T1 and T3, and IndiGo from all three terminals.
Air India, Vistara, and AirAsia India operate only from T3. For the peak hour, starting 0530 until 0630, the terminal-wise split of departures looks as below.
Interestingly, the evening peak also has a similar number of flights from T3 but there is less clamour at that time of the day.
The last few months have seen full-service carriers (FSCs) punch more than usual and record 90 percent-plus load factors, and IndiGo's increased fleet of high-density A321s is leading to higher passenger numbers with lesser flights.
While security sections are separate for domestic and international terminals, a choked entry point can still be a challenge.
What’s happening in Mumbai?
Mumbai airport is also seeing some complaints, again at its iconic T2 and not the older T1. A look at the schedules shows that Mumbai also has a peak at similar times. The airport sees the highest number of departures of the day between 0530 and 0600 hours, with 23 departures in the 30-minute window.
One can't really blame the airports since the aircraft parked overnight need to depart early in the morning for maximum utilisation and this is also the preferred time for passengers.
Creating infrastructure for one peak during the day is not possible from a cost perspective and hammering the peak to distribute the flights is detrimental from the perspective of passengers and airlines.
Between a rock and a hard place, peak-hour solutions are needed with out-of-the-box thinking to ensure that the flow of passengers is seamless.
International arrivals
Another frequent complaint has been the long queues for immigration on arrival. It is even more painful if only a handful of counters are operational. Like domestic terminals, international terminals also have a peak.
The peak hours at both Delhi and Mumbai for international arrivals is from midnight to 0300 hours. However, there are morning peaks as well for international departures and arrivals.
The difference in the peak at wee hours versus daytime is that most wide-body arrivals are between 0000 and 0300 hours, leading to more passengers per flight, compared to arrivals in narrow-body carriers during the day.
The primary Air India flights to North America during nights and other destinations in the afternoon help with staggered flights as compared to the late-night arrivals of European carriers.
What next?
Every entity is trying its best to tide over the crisis. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) is expected to provide additional manpower, which will enable operationalising more X-ray machines and adding more security-check lanes.
Is it time to revisit every process to benchmark and map it against newer standards to see if technologies like boarding pass scanners are leading to the bottleneck? What was done manually earlier is now being done by machines, but at times automation is creating a bottleneck during peak times.
It is time for the power of data to be harnessed to plan resources, says Mayur Patel, Head of Asia, OAG. The border force and control have used OAG air travel intelligence data for resource and systems planning to provide seamless travel experience at airports, he added.
While one would have expected airports to be proactive, things are working in a reactive manner and hopefully, airports, along with government entities, like CISF, Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), and the immigration authorities, would sort out the issues to ensure a smoother December last week.
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