Welcome Air Carnival, India's fourth regional airline

The southern sky turns pink today with the launch of Air Carnival. The Coimbatore based new regional airline just commences its commercial operations with its inaugural flight took off from Coimbatore Airport at 7:30 am and landed at Chennai Airport around around 9:00 am then it flew onward to Madurai. India Aviation Forum welcomes the new entrant and wishes best for its future. Air Carnival (IATA code: 2S), promoted by the Coimbatore based CMC group, becomes India's 14th carrier (with active AOP) and fourth regional carrier following Air Costa, Air Pegasus and TruJet. Notably, all four regional carrier are based in South India and Chennai is common in all four network. This highlights the prospect of Govt's regional connectivity scheme in the recently launched national civil aviation policy 2016. 

Comparative analysis of Bengaluru and Chennai Airport's passenger traffics

If we look at the top 10 busiest airports in India while Delhi and Mumbai are settled for the first and second position respectively for a quite a long time, competition can be seen between Bengaluru and Chennai for the third position. Until 2014 Chennai used to be at number 3 when Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru replaced it and became the third busiest Indian airport and the busiest airport in the South India. However a huge gap remains between Mumbai (second) and Bengaluru (third) airport's passenger volumes. Now if we look at the CY2015 ranking of top 10 airports (see above chart) and their passenger growth rates while all airports had recorded double digit growth rate, Chennai was the only one to grow at below 10% rate.