Aviation data · Data as of Sep 2026
How many people fly within India, and on which airline?
Every month DGCA publishes how many passengers India's scheduled domestic airlines carried. This page puts the monthly reports since January 2023 on one timeline: total traffic and its year-on-year change, who carries it, and how full the planes are. Every figure comes from DGCA's own tables, and every chart has the numbers behind it as a table.
1 Monthly domestic passengers and year-on-year change
Lower panel: green = growth, red = decline. Lighter bars for 2023 are DGCA's published growth figures, measured against a Covid-hit 2022. The axis is capped at 30%, so January 2023 (+95.7%) and February 2023 (+56.8%) run off the top. Hover or tap for exact values.
Show the data as a table
Source: DGCA, Government of India, monthly domestic traffic reports (latest report, PDF; all reports). Data as of Sep 2026.
3 Passenger load factor (seat factor), airline × month
* Air India until December 2024 (DGCA's figure includes Air India Express); Air India Group from January 2025. Blank cells mean the airline was not in DGCA's table that month. Rows are ordered by passengers carried.
Show the latest month as a table
Source: DGCA, Government of India, Table 1 "Month-wise seat factor of scheduled operators" in each monthly report (latest, PDF). Carriers are shown as DGCA reports them. Data as of Sep 2026.
4 Capacity against demand Derived
This chart is not DGCA data. DGCA publishes passengers and a seat factor but never publishes seats. Seats here are worked out as passengers divided by seat factor, carrier by carrier, then added up. Treat the direction and the gap as the signal, not the absolute number of seats. How this is derived and what it assumes.
The gap between the two lines is the change in seat factor. Where the seats line sits above the passengers line, capacity moved ahead of demand — added faster, or cut more slowly — and seat factor fell. Where it sits below, demand moved ahead of capacity and seat factor rose. Either line can sit on either side of zero, so read the gap rather than the direction: the takeaway above states which way both are moving in the latest month.
Show the data as a table
Show how each airline changed over the year
Derived by Strategic Bearing from DGCA, Government of India: monthly passengers by airline and Table 1 seat factor (latest, PDF). Data as of Sep 2026.
Methodology and notes
Where the numbers come from
The figures come from DGCA's monthly Domestic Air Traffic reports, with one PDF a month. Each report repeats the year's earlier months, so every month is taken from the latest report for that calendar year, which picks up any revisions. Passenger counts are in lakh (1 lakh = 100,000). As a cross-check, totals and individual airlines are compared with DGCA's ICAO ATR Form A monthly statistics (XLSX). Any disagreements are listed under Data checks.
Year-on-year (YoY)
YoY compares a month with the same month a year earlier. From January 2024 it is computed from the monthly totals on this page. It matches the "monthly growth" figure printed in each DGCA report to within 0.02 percentage points. Despite the name, DGCA's "monthly growth" is a year-on-year figure, not month-on-month. The 2023 values are DGCA's published figures, because this series starts in January 2023. Early-2023 growth is flattered by a Covid-hit base: DGCA's January 2023 report puts January 2022 at 64.08 lakh passengers.
Airline grouping and mergers
- Air India Group (chart 2) adds up Air India, Air India Express, AIX Connect (formerly AirAsia India) and Vistara in every month, including before they merged. DGCA notes that AIX Connect merged with Air India Express effective October 2024, and that Vistara merged with Air India on 12 November 2024. From 2025, DGCA reports "Air India Group" (Air India and Air India Express). DGCA notes that its "Air India" column includes Air India Express.
- Go First stopped operating on 3 May 2023, according to DGCA's May 2023 report. It drops out of the tables after May 2023.
- Others covers the small regional airlines: Star Air, Fly91, IndiaOne Air, Fly Big and Zooom. Alliance Air is shown separately.
- Load factors (chart 3) cannot be added across airlines without seat capacity, so carriers are shown as DGCA reports them. The "Air India" row continues as "Air India Group" from January 2025.
Implied seats (chart 4)
DGCA publishes passengers and a seat factor; it does not publish seats. Chart 4 divides each airline's passengers by its seat factor to imply that airline's seats, then adds the airlines together. Doing it per airline rather than on the national total matters, because a single system-wide load factor would assume every carrier flies equally full.
- It is a restatement, not new evidence. The gap between passenger growth and implied-seat growth is the change in seat factor, near enough by construction. It is here because capacity is the number an operator can act on, where a load factor is only a symptom.
- It assumes seat factor means passengers as a share of seats. If DGCA's Table 1 figure is distance-weighted instead (revenue passenger-kilometres over available seat-kilometres, as in its ATR Form A statistics), the result is a proxy for seats rather than a count of them. Month-to-month comparisons still hold, because the basis is the same each month; the absolute level may not.
- Carriers with a seat factor at or below 5%, or none printed, are left out of the derivation, since dividing by a near-zero load factor produces a meaningless seat count. In this dataset that is Zooom.
- Because the series needs a year-earlier comparison, the growth lines start in January 2024.
Data checks
Not included yet
On-time performance (OTP), cancellations, complaints and international traffic are not on this page yet. DGCA measured OTP at four metro airports until 2024, and has since widened it to six and then ten airports, so that series needs care to stay comparable.