BENGALURU: The Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) has recorded a 97.5 per cent increase in passenger traffic from April to December 2022 of the ongoing financial year compared to the same period during the previous fiscal, said Airports Authority of India (AAI).
International travellers have seen a huge surge this fiscal with 27.53 lakh departing from Bengaluru relative to just 7.12 lakh during same period last year. AAI has released its Air Traffic Report for December 2022 and the traffic figures for three quarters of this financial year.
Festive month of December has seen a whopping surge in air traffic in 2022 at KIA with 3,90,888 flyers, more than double the figure in December 2021. The stats reveal that 2.27 crore flyers, both domestic and international, flew out of the airport in 2022-2023 while it was just 1.15 crore in 2021-2022.
Only Kalaburagi airport has recorded around 2,000 passengers less this fiscal compared to the previous year while two airports have seen a dip in flyers in December 2022 compared to December 2021. Belagavi saw a huge fall of 9,000 while Kalaburagi was down by 1,000-odd flyers.
Aviation expert Captain Mohan Ranganathan said, “This surge was helped by the lifting of lockdown, which had left the public frustrated who were unable to travel. It would only go down in future because of the overall surge in costs across sectors.”
Belagavi airport director Rajesh Kumar Maurya told TNIE that the stoppage of operations by Spicejet to Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad from as well as Alliance Air stopping its flight to Pune have heavily impacted its footfalls.