Bengaluru airport is country's most punctual one, reveals DGCA data

Kempegowda International Airport (KIA), Bengaluru has emerged the most punctual airport across the metros, as per the data available with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

According to the data for September 2017, Bengaluru airport has seen best on-time performance (OTP) across metros in three of the six scheduled domestic airlines, while coming second on other three with a narrow difference.

Experts attribute this phenomenon to the more capacity at the Bengaluru airport. "The Bengaluru airport has better capacity and lesser congestion than other airports in the country," said Manish Agarwal, Leader, Capital Projects and Infrastructure, PwC India.

Leading the list of airlines, Air India, India's flag carrier, witnessed 90% OTP at the Bengaluru airport, far ahead of second placed Hyderabad's Rajiv Gandhi International Airport's 86.1%. Mumbai has seen the lowest OTP for Air India at 63.3%, among the metros.

Full service airline Jet Airways, along with its wholly-owned subsidiary Jetlite saw OTP of 83.1% in Bengaluru, notches ahead of 73.8% at the Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Among the low-cost airlines, Spicejet has the highest on-time performance at Delhi airport with 90.4% efficiency, while Bengaluru is close second with an OTP of 88.5%. Mumbai has the lowest of 76.3% OTP for the airline.

For Go Air, Bengaluru has seen 82.3% of OTP, second to Hyderabad's 94.7%. In IndiGo's case, Bengaluru's 93.5% OTP, a shade lower than Delhi's OTP of 94%.

For Tata joint-venture premium airline, Vistara, Bengaluru again has the highest OTP of 92.5% marginally higher than Hyderabad's 92.2%.

For September, the KIA had seen 265 flights per day at an average of 69,000 passengers.

For first six months of this fiscal, KIA's OTP touched 86%. In case of baggage delivery time at the airport, the first bag delivered was within 8 minutes of parking of the flight for domestic; and 10 minutes for international arrivals; the last bag delivered was within 16 minutes for domestic arrivals and 33 minutes for international arrivals.

The highest single day passenger traffic of 78,278 was recorded by the airport on May 19, 2017.

"Efficiency is the cornerstone of our operations. We are committed to provide our passengers a seamless travel experience combined with good connectivity, world-class infrastructure and service delivery excellence. Our continuous focus on customer experience of airlines as well as passengers - resulted in new quality benchmarks, assured service levels and high reliability," BIAL spokesperson told DH.

On contrary, Mumbai airport, that has seen the lowest efficiency across the metros has been running beyond its capacity, causing significant number of congestions and delayed landings.