IATA says India’s domestic revenue passenger kilometres fell 7.5% year on year, while capacity fell only 1.2%, which pushed load factor down 5.4 percentage points to 78.7%, evidence that planes were emptier not simply fewer in number.
DGCA’s August data also point to weaker fill rates across the main carriers. IndiGo’s load factor fell to 79.2% from 82.4% in July, Air India Group’s to 77.0% from 83.2%, and Akasa’s to 87.6% from 91.9%, while total domestic passengers fell 6.34% year on year to 12.126 million in August.
That means the market’s problem was not pure supply withdrawal. OAG data show some trunk routes did lose seats but Mumbai-Hyderabad capacity was down 10% and Mumbai-Chennai down 9%, but the sharper fall in traffic than in capacity suggests weakening demand or disrupted demand not just fewer departures.
The strongest hard evidence in the public data is operational strain. DGCA says technical issues accounted for 50.2% of airline cancellations in August, ahead of operational reasons at 20.4%, which is consistent with engine-related groundings and maintenance bottlenecks reducing schedule reliability and pushing some travellers away.
High fares may also have depressed discretionary travel, though the clearest published fare evidence so far is for the upcoming Diwali period rather than August itself. Ahead of the November 8 festival, reports show steep fare inflation on several domestic routes and DGCA has asked airlines to add more than 1760 flights, suggesting that demand is still strong for peak travel even as August looked weak.
The Gulf effect is plausible but not yet proven in the public record. IATA says Middle East carriers’ traffic fell 14.6% in August, and India’s domestic market feeds a large volume of Gulf-bound international traffic, so disruption there could have reduced some domestic feeder legs.
Publicly available route-level evidence remains incomplete. The clearest reported seat cuts were on Mumbai-Hyderabad and Mumbai-Chennai, both down sharply in OAG data but that is capacity rather than passenger count, and it does not establish that these were the largest traffic losers.