Mumbai airport handles 1036 flights in 24hrs, creates new world record

Mumbai airport handled a record 1036 flights on November 21, 2025

The Mumbai airport on November 21, created a new world record for single-runway operations handling 1,036 take-offs and landings translating to one aircraft movement in under 100 seconds. This makes the twin-terminal airport the busiest in the world as most other large airports have two or more runways like those in Delhi, London, Dubai and New York that operate simultaneously.

Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) previous benchmark of 1,032 aircraft movement was set on November 11, 2023. These comprised 755 domestic flights and 281 international flights. Out of that, 520 were arriving flights and 516 departing flights.

A total of 170,488 passenger movements from CSMIA on November 21, 2025 constituted 121,527 passengers travelling on domestic routes while 48,961 travelled internationally, coming close to its highest-ever single-day passenger traffic of 170,516 recorded on January 11, 2025.

CSMIA witnessed 86,443 passenger arrivals and 84,045 passenger departures from Mumbai on the same day. Delhi remains the busiest airport in India with daily aircraft movements averaging 1300.

From the overall passenger movements observed on 21 November, 2025 at CSMIA, among domestic routes, the highest passenger movements were recorded in sectors such as Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Kolkata, while international travel saw strong demand for destinations including Dubai, Abu Dhabi, London Heathrow, Doha and Jeddah.

Though Mumbai has two runways, both cannot be operated at the same time as they criss-cross each other. London’s Gatwick, Lisbon’s Humberto, Xiamen’s Gaoqi and San Diego’s International are some of the large airports with a single runway.

Until 2017, Gatwick had the world’s busiest single runway (55 aircraft movements per hour), and still has the world’s busiest single runway operation during the day. But since there are restrictions on aircraft movements at night, the airport trails CSMIA on the count with around 780-800 movements.

CSMIA has scaled its digital infrastructure, from enhanced self-baggage drop (SBD) units and self-check-in kiosks to wider DigiYatra and FTI-TTP adoption, ensuring faster passenger processing across the terminals.

“Behind the scenes, the upgraded Airport Operations Control Centre (AOCC) has also strengthened real-time monitoring and cross-stakeholder coordination,” a statement from Mumbai airport said.