In a new milestone for Indian aviation, the country's airports in 2017-18 have handled over 300 million throughput passengers for the first time, according to data released by the Airport Authority of India (AAI). These include domestic, international as well as passengers in general aviation.
Each passenger handled on domestic flights is counted twice -- once at the airport for departure and once again at the landing airport. International passengers, of course, are counted just once.
Passenger throughput grew over 16.5 per cent in 2017-18 to hit over 308 million over the previous financial year (265 million passengers). While domestic passengers handled by airports went up by 18.3 per cent, international grew by 10.4 per cent.
What is interesting is that the 20 international airports in the country (excluding the joint ventures) saw a passenger growth of 19.3 per cent (international and domestic) while the six JV airports, primarily because of capacity constraints, could grow 13 per cent.
The huge increase in traffic has been primarily due to increase in movement across the country -- domestic traffic went up by 14.4 per cent in the same period while international was up 9.4 per cent.
In terms of aircraft movement, the highest growth was seen in Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar and Jaipur among international airports in domestic skies. Among JV airports Cochin took the top slot, followed by Hyderabad.