DGCA responds to The Flying Engineer

On 14th November 2014, the Flying Engineer had pointed out discrepancies between airline’s reported data and DGCA published data. The Director of Statistics at the DGCA – R Savithri – responded with the following statement:

“The issue of mismatch between the passenger numbers published under passengers carried as per the ICAO Form ‘A’ for the said months and the passenger numbers published on page 14 of Domestic Traffic Reports had already been noticed by DGCA. ln order to resolve this problem a meeting was held in the month July and it was found that the main reason of the mismatch lies in the fact that the airlines were not including the number of passengers carried on the domestic leg of the international routes while reporting data as per Form ‘A’ of ICAO. While passengers carried published on page 14 of Domestic Traffic Reports includes this number. There is still a small difference in the number of passengers carried shown under the two tabs from the month of August onwards. This difference still persists due to the fact that the passengers carried published on page14 of Domestic Traffic Reports also includes charter or non scheduled flights data which is not a requirement for ICAO Form ‘A’“.

The implications of this is that the market share of various airlines, as calculated and published by the DGCA, is not truly indicative of an airline’s market share. The variations are, admittedly, small.

The director also clearly stated that the hours under ‘Aircraft flown’ correspond to Block Hours. Some airlines, in an attempt to make their aircraft utilization numbers appear good, had stated that those were flight hours. The director clarified that ‘no airline is reporting flight hours instead of block hours’.

The Flying Engineer has also learnt that the statistics for AirAsia India and Air Costa will be available in the statistics publication January 2015 onwards. Air Costa’s data has been included in the Total Traffic Statistics of Scheduled lndian Carriers for the month of October, which was published a few days ago.