Air passenger traffic picking up in Chennai – The Hindu

Chennai News

Two months after the domestic flight operations resumed, Chennai airport has been seeing some increase in the number of travellers.

Officials of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said that when domestic flights were resumed in the last week of May, 23,002 passengers travelled in a week.

When the services restarted, only about 50 flights were allowed in a day as the State government had imposed a restriction saying there could only be 25 flights coming to the airport every day from other States. In June, the flights to other cities within the State had gone up, thus pushing up the aircraft movement marginally and nearly 60 to 65 flights were handled at the airport daily. Most people, who were still stuck in the city, began departing from here and those wanting to return too came here and the passenger count in June was 1,45,671.

There was a 6.6% increase in passenger traffic in July when compared with the previous month.

‘Not regular flyers’

Officials said while the airport had witnessed a spike in passenger traffic, these were no regular travellers. “What we see now is only a fraction of the passenger traffic from the same time last year. At present, there are many who want to visit their relatives in hospital or those who come down for some treatment from other cities. Then, some of them travel for other family emergencies. We barely see any corporates or other frequent travellers taking flights now,” an official said.

Though there was a ban on flights to Kolkata from Chennai last month, the passenger traffic had not reduced in July, when compared to the previous month. “One of the major reasons for this is, many international passengers from other cities travelled to Chennai to take Vande Bharat flights from here. We realised there were many transit passengers in July and hence, there could have been a minor increase in traffic,” he added.

AAI had been hoping to get the State government nod to increase the number of flights this month. If that happens, the traffic may go up to some extent.

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/air-passenger-traffic-picking-up-in-chennai/article32255042.ece