2025 promises to be a sky high year for Indian flyers. There are a spate of high profile launches on the anvil, right from at least two spanking new airports, to a flurry of new airlines taking to the skies.
At least three new airline companies are scheduled to start domestic operations this year – the Kerala-based Air Kerala and Al-Hind, as well as UP-based Shankh Air. It is to be noted that while all three have declared that they will start with domestic operations in 2025, none of them have got all the full approvals from the regulatory bodies, yet.
All three, especially the Kerala ones, aim to focus on connecting the region to the Gulf and nearby foreign destinations. Air Kerala was originally conceived as a Kerala government project to alleviate the travel woes of the sizeable number of Malayali expats in the Gulf, though nothing much came out of it. The present avatar is supported by Malayali entrepreneurs based in the Middle East.
Presently, India has national airlines plying domestically – Indigo, Air India, Air India Express and SpiceJet – and a few offering regional connectivity, like Fly91 based in Goa and Star Air headquartered in Bengaluru.
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India’s aviation history is a veritable graveyard of Icarian ambitions burnt by the sun of intense competition and market realities like razor-thin margins and the variable cost of oil which tends to fluctuate dramatically. Once deregulated in the nineties, India’s commercial aviation sector immediately expanded beyond the government operators Indian Airlines and Vayudoot, to see all kind of players and epiphanies. The first ever private airline, East West Airlines disappeared soon after its promoter Thakiyudeen Waheed was shot dead by underworld gangsters in Mumbai. Fate wasn’t kind to many others, too, like ModiLuft which shut down despite a tie-up with Germany’s Lufthansa, Air Damania which was merged with SkylineNEPC and stopped operations soon after, and even Air Deccan, which revolutionised Indian aviation by ushering in the low-cost model, but was forced to merge into Kingfisher Airlines (which itself went belly up once its high flying promoter Vijay Mallya fled the country to escape jail).
In fact, the only one from the 1990s which survived for long was Jet Airways, which even became market leader for a point in time, before the curse of aviation caught up with it, too, shutting down in 2019. Recently, GoAir, despite being promoted by the Bombay Dyeing family, also got grounded.
It’s not always been a case of shutting down alone. Two years ago, Akasa Air, initially funded by stock market king Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, was launched, and has managed to stay afloat by the skin of its teeth. SpiceJet, too, after its launch in the mid-2000s has managed to hold its own despite changing ownership multiple times and severe financial and legal turmoil.
As aviation experts say, the fate of the new airlines will depend on how well they manage their finances and save money in a sector where razor-thin profit margins are often the best you could hope for. But the glamour, and the prospect – a nation of one billion plus which is already the fastest growing aviation market in the world – keep beckoning.