Vistara and Indigo

Earlier today the Air Traffic Controller of Bangalore tweeted that Air Vistara had a 100% on time performance in Bangalore.

My immediate reaction was that this was because Air Vistara is positioned as a premium service, and hence their schedule is more “sparse” and has greater “slack”. That, I mentioned, has a direct consequence on their on-time performance.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation puts out monthly reports on the performance of airlines in India. The data they dispense is very interesting, but the format is horrible. It’s a PDF embedded into a 20th century web page. If you can parse the above link there are a number of insights to be gleaned.

Firstly, a full 63% of flight delays in India (for the month of June) have been classified as “reactionary” (not cutting and pasting the image here because I don’t want to desecrate this blog by putting a pie chart on it). This is what airport announcers term as “delay caused due to delay in incoming aircraft”.

In other words, what happens is that airlines try to over-optimise their schedules too much leaving little slack between two consecutive flights for a particular aircraft. And so any delay in any flight cascades through the length of the day for that particular aircraft. My hypothesis (haven’t found data to back this up) is that Vistara has a more relaxed schedule than other airlines and hence has better on-time performance.

It is also pertinent to mention that Vistara has a much lower passenger load factor compared to other airlines. The average Vistara flight in June was only about 60% full, comfortably putting it in last place. Perhaps the premium pricing hasn’t been attracting the kind of passengers as hoped for. Or they’re not marketing well to the right kind of people.

The other airline which merits mention here is Indigo, which seems to be literally running away with the market. Not only is it comfortably number 1 with a consistent 37% market share, it also has the lowest proportion of cancelled flights, a pretty high passenger load factor (86%) and better on-time performance than any of the other large airlines.

Airlines is an industry where there are significant positive feedbacks – if you are on time, not only do more people want to fly you but you can also have a more efficient schedule. And so forth. And there are definite economies of scale in maintenance and schedule density and so forth. Indigo is taking advantage of all of those.

It may not be a particularly profitable industry, but the airline industry is surely interesting to watch!

One thought on “Vistara and Indigo”

  1. you know i’m damn suspicious of indigo’s on time. why? delhi to hyderabad is 1h 45min flying time. their scheduled flight time will be at least 2h 5min. the key is to put buffers into your scheduling times that you’re telling passengers.

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