Infographic | Delays and cancellations by major Indian airlines

In light of the slew of delays and cancellations beleaguering Vistara, here is a look at how major Indian airlines performed from October 2023 to February 2024.

Vistara has been hit by a slew of delays and cancellations with 50 flights scrapped on Monday. The carrier is reportedly reducing its operations on a temporary basis due to a non-availability of pilots.

Today, the authorities took note of the situation with Vistara with the civil aviation ministry stating that it is monitoring the situation and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), which falls under the ministry, stating that it has sought daily information from the carrier about flights that are being delayed or cancelled.

In light of this situation, here is a look at the delays and cancellations of major airline companies over the last few months. Notably, the DGCA has only released the data till February 2024, leaving the month of March out of the purview of this analysis.

In December 2022, following the purchase of AirAsia by the Tata Group, the airline had to stop the AirAsia branding and became AIX Connect.

The diagram shows delays by measuring the on-time performance (OTP) of the scheduled domestic flights computed for four metro airports -- Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. It also provides information about the overall cancellation rate of the airlines.

October 2023

This month saw the most delays by SpiceJet with the worst on-time performance of 58.1 per cent, while IndiGo did its best to get their fliers to the destinations on time.

Alliance Air, a low-cost carrier, which was earlier a subsidiary of Indian Airlines, before it was merged with Air India, recorded the highest cancellation rate of 3.67 per cent. Akasa did the best in this regard, with no cancellations in the month of October.

November 2023

This month again saw Alliance Air have the most cancellations at 2.83 per cent while Akasa had the best on-time performance of 78.2 per cent. SpiceJet did the worst this month as well in terms of delays with an OTP of just 41.8 per cent.

December 2023

Again Alliance Air saw the most cancellations with a rate of 3.21 per cent. Akasa was the best in this regard with a cancellation rate of just 0.17 per cent.

The carrier was also on top again with its timely performances, logging a 72.7 per cent OTP. SpiceJet did the worst with a 29.9 per cent OTP.

January 2024

The start of the year was tough on IndiGo which had a 5 per cent cancellation rate. Akasa did the best with just 0.17 per cent cancellation rate.

The carrier also did the best again in terms of on-time performance, which saw SpiceJet perform the worst yet another month with just 37.9 per cent in OTP.

February 2024

AIX Connect was the best in terms of getting passengers to destinations on time, while Alliance Air performed the poorest this month.

As far as cancellations go, Akasa had the least, while Alliance Air had the highest cancellation rate.