Navi Mumbai Airport Likely To Reach Full Capacity In First Year Of Operations Itself

(MENAFN- Live Mint) The Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) is now due for inauguration, delayed by over a year from the original announcements. Airlines, led by IndiGo, have been announcing their plans for the new airport from May this year, with the latest being from Air India Express. A look at the announcements and what these translate into would indicate that if the announcements are matched by action on the ground, we could be starting at the new airport being packed to its phase 1 capacity in the very first year of operations.

For the record, the airport plans to open with a capacity of 20 million or two crore passengers a year. When an airport plans its capacity, it includes the footfalls, which are both arriving and departing passengers. While the footfalls are not uniform across months or even during a day, this roughly translates to a capacity of 1.6 million passengers or 16 lakh a month.

IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India Express

IndiGo, the largest carrier in the country and the market leader, was the first to announce its plans for NMIA, back in May 2025. Even as the date of operationalisation or even inauguration remains elusive, IndiGo had said that it would start operations at NMIA with 18 daily departures to 15 destinations, and would scale up to 79 daily departures, including 14 international ones by November 2025. The airline plans to further scale up to 140 departures by next November, when the Winter 2026 schedule will be in operation. Depending on when the airport is expected to start operations, the November aim may move but the airline may end up offering 14,694 daily seats for departures within the next few months, counting on the A320 operations. The airline has a large number of A321neo in its fleet, which if deployed, could add to this count.

Also Read: DGCA grants aerodrome licence to Navi Mumbai International airport

In June 2025, Akasa Air announced that it would commence commercial operations from NMIA with 100+ weekly domestic departures initially, scaling up to 300+ domestic and over 50 international departures per week in the winter schedule. With the start date of operations still under wraps, even if one assumes that the peak of announcement would be achieved in March, the last month of the winter schedule, we are talking about 43 daily domestic departures and 7 daily international departures, a total of 50 departures from Akasa Air. At an average of 186 seats, this translates to 9,300 daily seats or 65,100 seats a week.

For Akasa Air, Navi Mumbai airport will bring the much-needed capacity to Mumbai. The airline plans to have 10 parking bases in Mumbai by the end of FY2027. As Mumbai airport, also run by the Adani group, looks to decongest itself, could it offer a sweet deal to Akasa Air to shift all its operations? For the record, Akasa Air operates from the Manohar International Airport at Mopa, Goa and not from Dabolim.

The latest announcement came from the Air India group, which said that its low-cost subsidiary Air India Express will start with 20 daily departures from NMIA (to 15 cities), and scale up to 55 daily departures including five international ones by mid-2026 and 60 daily departures by winter 2026. At 55 daily departures and an average of 186 seats on offer, Air India Express would have 10,230 seats on offer per day or 71,610 seats per week.

Over the next few months, this would mean a little over 10.25 lakh departure seats (per month) on offer across three airlines and the same number of arrivals, a grand total of 20.5 lakh seats per month.

A conservative estimate of an 80% load factor across arrivals and departures for all airlines would mean roughly 16.4 lakh passengers per month, which is exactly what the capacity of the airport is in the first phase.

Tail Note

If one would assume that the airport operator would be happy, it may possibly not be the case because a high footfall would mean good business but limited time to expand. While finances are one part of the challenge, which can be tied up by raising funds, little can be done about the speed of construction which will take its own time.

All eyes would now be on two things. First, if the announcements materialise and second, what happens to the closure of Terminal 1 at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA). The Adani group had communicated that it intends to rebuild Terminal 1 with the demolition planned in November 2025, which now looks unlikely.

Mumbai has had a capacity constraint for a very long time and the new capacity will be gobbled up quickly. However, what would not have been thought by anyone is that Navi Mumbai airport's first phase is reaching its peak even before it completes its first year of operations.

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