IGI, Jewar or Navi Mumbai: India’s new airport is stuck in the middle

A month into operations, Noida International Airport (NIA) at Jewar is facing a competitive problem that few new Indian airports have had to deal with: a nearby, better-connected rival that is nowhere near full. NIA is roughly 65 kilometres from Noida’s Sector 18, reachable mainly by cab, while Delhi’s IGI Airport remains far better connected by multi-modal transport for travellers across Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and Ghaziabad. That gap in convenience has shaped how slowly NIA’s flight network has grown.

The airport’s own numbers tell the ramp-up story: 86 flights across 5 cities in its opening week, rising to 224 flights across 15 cities by week four. Daily footfall climbed from 1,427 passengers on day one to 2,797 this Monday. Of the three airlines that launched service at NIA, Air India Express has already exited the airport as parent Air India grapples with mounting losses, while Akasa Air has paused its Bengaluru and Navi Mumbai routes launched on June 16 in favour of a twice-daily NIA-Mumbai CSMIA service.

IndiGo has taken the opposite approach, effectively treating NIA as a dedicated NCR base with 105 weekly flights to 15 cities, including twice-daily Lucknow and Jaipur connections. Its only cutback has been the Noida-Chandigarh route, dropped for poor footfall. Between June 15 and July 13, the airport logged 18,424 departures, 18,089 arrivals, 11,732 transfer passengers and 13,042 in-transit passengers, with about 40% of total traffic made up of connecting flyers.

The comparison with Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) is instructive. NMIA opened roughly 6 months before NIA and does not compete with Mumbai’s already-saturated CSMIA, so airlines expanding into the Mumbai region had little choice but to move there. It has carried more than 23 lakh passengers since a Christmas launch, connects to 46 domestic destinations, handles around 150 flights a day, and starts international flights this Wednesday. NIA, by contrast, opened with a terminal built for 1.2 crore passengers annually against NMIA’s 2 crore capacity, and analysts expect it will take until 2030 — when IGI Airport nears its peak capacity of 13 to 14 crore passengers a year — for NIA’s traffic to meaningfully accelerate.

YEIDA CEO R K Singh said the authority is improving lighting and road connectivity along the Yamuna Expressway, and that a new NHAI interchange linking the Eastern Peripheral Expressway near Dankaur is due to open on August 15, which should widen NIA’s catchment to Ghaziabad, Hapur and Bulandshahr. ‘About 13-14 outbound flights and an equal number of inbound flights operate daily from Noida airport,’ he said, adding that average daily traffic of 2,500-2,600 passengers is expected to keep growing.

A senior airline official summed up the airport’s position as it competes for market share: ‘Noida Airport has set sail amid the perfect storm. The first few years are going to be tough, but the long-term prospects are sound.’

[Source: Wikimedia Commons/Prime Minister’s Office, Government of India]