NEW DELHI: The Indigo meltdown in December dragged down India's booming air traffic growth story.
Data released by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) shows an overall dip in patronage in December 2025 by 2.8 per cent, with just 3.64 crore passengers taking to the skies as compared to 3.75 crore in December 2024.
International passenger growth, though, has been on the uptick.
‘Air Traffic Report - December 2025’ report also highlights that the first three quarters of the financial year 2025-2026 show a growth of 2.7 per cent over the corresponding period last year.
In sharp contrast with the month-on-month growth in passenger traffic both domestically and internationally generally recorded in the country (except during the Covid years), December passenger traffic has gone down.
The Indigo fiasco for nine days in December, which created large-scale cancellations, was also a cause for the domestic patronage to slid by 4.9 per cent with just 2.89 crore flying within India in December 2025 as compared to 3.03 crore in December 2024.
Internationally, the growth stood at 6 per cent with 0.75 lakh passengers in December 2025 as compared to 0.71 lakh in December 2024.
Data on different airlines and their patronage released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) earlier this week also showed that Indigo’s market share of flyers slumped to 59.6 per cent in December 2025 as compared to its share of 63.6 per cent in November.
When the Aircraft Movements (arrivals and departures) are taken into account, there was a surge of 5.6 per cent in December 2025 internationally, with 4.34 crore ATMs recorded.
Domestically, there has been a negative growth of 4.5 per cent with 20 crore movements as against 21 crore movements during the compared period.
April to December data comparison
The strong passenger traffic growth since the onset of the financial year has prevented an overall dip, though, as seen by the figures for the first nine months of this fiscal year.
From April to December 2025-2026, the overall passenger growth is 2.7 per cent, over April – December 2024-2025.
A total of 3.11 crore passengers flew as compared to 3.03 crore during the previous year.
International growth surged by 7.2 per cent (6.09 cr international flyers versus 5.68 cr) with domestic growth going up by 1.7 per cent (2.5 cr flyers vs 2.46 cr).