So DNA put out a news report proclaiming “Air India, IndiGo flyers worst hit by flight delays in January: DGCA“. The way the headline has been written, it appears as if Air India and Indigo are equally bad in terms of delayed flights. And an innumerate reader or journalist would actually believe that number, since the article states that 96,000 people were inconvenienced by Air India’s delays, and 75,000 odd by Indigo’s delays – both are of the same order of magnitude.
However, by comparing raw numbers thus, an important point that this news report misses out is that Indigo flies twice as many passengers as Air India. For the same period as the above data (January 2015), DGCA data (it’s all in this one big clunky PDF) shows that while about 11.65 lakh passengers flew Air India, about 22.76 lakh passengers flew Indigo – almost twice the number. So on a percentage basis, Indigo is only half as bad as Air India.
The graph above shows the number of passengers delayed as a proportion of the number of passengers flown, and this indicates that Indigo is in clear second place as an offender (joined by tiny AirAsia). Yet, to bracket it with Air India (by not taking proportions) indicates sheer innumeracy on the part of the journalist (unnamed in the article)!
I’m not surprised by the numbers, though. The thing with Indigo (and AirAsia) is that the business model depends upon quick turnaround of planes, and thus there is little slack between flights. In winters, morning flights (especially from North India) get delayed because of fog and the lack of slack means the delays cascade leading to massive delays. Hence there is good reason to not fly Indigo in winter (and for Indigo to build slack into its winter schedules). Interestingly, the passenger load factor (number of passengers carried as a function of capacity) for Indigo is 85%, which is interestingly lower than Jet Airways (a so-called “full service carrier”)’ s 87%. And newly launched full service Vistara operated at only 45% in January!
We are in for interesting times in the Indian aviation industry.