Indian Airports Look The Other Way While Passengers Suffer

The world over, major airports such as London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol saw crowds wait for hours during the summers. Social media was full of the troubles faced by folks at the usually well-managed airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam, which is the home of KLM and a global air traffic hub.

But if that was not enough for Indian airports to take note, closer home, the Ministry of Civil Aviation in India instituted a ticker on their website, which they dutifully updated every day to share the rise in domestic air traffic. On Nov. 26, the ticker reported that 4 lakh passengers took a flight domestically around India. Since then, the number has stayed consistently in the 3.9 lakh-4.1 lakh passengers range through the fortnight.

Moreover, this is an annual occurrence, with the wedding season, year-end revelry, holidays, and the tourists and NRIs descending on India in full force to visit families. Except, this year, it was going to come with a force multiplier, fondly being called revenge travel. An avalanche was coming their way, except perhaps airports were not planning for it.

Airlines have been mounting flights, and the airport operators have turned a blind eye to their capacity constraints and customer experience, all in favour of the shareholders. All of this has led to chaos at major airport terminals, including Delhi’s T3 and Mumbai’s T2.

Take Delhi, for instance. The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, the nodal agency for airport security in India, told The Hindu that Delhi T3’s hand baggage screening had the capacity to handle about 15 flights per hour. However, during peak hours such as morning 5-9 a.m. or evening 4-8 p.m., Delhi would see up to 21 departures.

Rudimentary maths, considering all these flights are operated by 180-seating planes at 91% occupancy, means about 1,000 more people are to be processed an hour, which means 9,000 more people at the airport during peak hours. The truth is, in no-frill airlines dominated India, many airlines use 220-passenger carrying aircraft during peak hours to maximise their flight throughput, and the numbers are higher.

There are many parts to this problem, but if I had to condense it into three words, it would be people, processes and infrastructure.

First, the people aspect. India’s airport security is largely entrusted to the Central Industrial Security Force, with some smaller airports using the police forces. Airports collect a service fee from passengers via the airlines and then pass on a share of this to the security agency for their services provided. In May 2022, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security gave the go-ahead to allow airport operators to station non-CISF personnel to handle non-core tasks. The privatised airports immediately swung into action and moved forward with the replacements.

However, these replacements are not fully aware of the workflow in many cases and are unable to control the crowds. To add to it, many of the passengers flying at the moment are the occasional flyers who do not know the processes and hence stumble at every step of the way. Yours truly has seen people stumble at the sight of a bar-code-operated barrier to enter the security check area in Delhi and Mumbai with the look of what do we do here? All of this means people are taking more time to pass through the security checkpoints at the airport.

Second, let's touch upon the processes. India’s threat assessment, along with India’s crowd problem, means airport processes are designed only to allow passengers into the airport. Left to our devices, some Indian families will come all the way to the aircraft to drop off their family members for their flight. However, these processes have not been fully digitalised yet, or when they have been, there is a penalty for using them.

For instance, digiyatra, while the talk of the town, is only a fortnight old and is a drop in the ocean. Delhi Airport itself needs to add digiyatra enablement at all gates, and this needs to be rolled out across the nation with urgency if we would want about 30-40% of the travellers to really benefit from it. Right now, there is only one gate in Delhi, one in Bengaluru and one in Varanasi.

Passengers in India prefer to check in offline since that allows them to get a seat on the plane without paying additional charges for selecting a seat. That adds to the crowd at the check-in areas.

We need to start setting the ground for a trusted traveller programme which allows frequent and low-threat passengers to go through express queues, just like the TSA PreCheck in the U.S., which clears passengers after a background check, but that means no longer do these passengers need to unpack their bags or remove their shoes, adding to the speed of clearing passengers.

We also need to ensure that more and more people are able and enabled to use self-service options at airports, such as kiosks to print their bag tags and boarding passes, and the self-baggage drop terminals, which are installed at Mumbai T2 and Bengaluru T1, but are used more as an extension to airline machinery rather than for its self-drop features.

Last, we come to the infrastructure. An airport is built for passengers to flow through it, not to be held in its four walls.

India is finally transitioning to Automatic Tray Return Systems at major airports. However, people are used to the older systems where they dump everything on the tray itself. With no one handholding the non-frequent flyers through the process at the airport, they don’t remove belts, wallets, water bottles, coins and so on, adding to a pile of re-checks at an already crowded airport. And with the current winter season, passengers travelling from North India are going to use more trays to screen their warm clothes for a security check as well.

What is the need of the hour is more screening stations, along with a lot more awareness. The X-Ray screening stations are coming, but if we really want to solve this problem for good, we need to upgrade to newer technology urgently, which allows for screening without the need to remove items from bags altogether. If London Heathrow does not need your water bottles out, then Delhi shouldn’t either. If Abu Dhabi has, for years, allowed laptops to be left in the bags, Mumbai should not want them out either.

Remember, airlines are currently operating at about 90% of approved schedules, so they can add about 400 more flights as requirements grow. And the fog is yet to set in. If we don’t fix things quickly, winter 2023 will be a menace as well.

Ajay Awtaney writes about aviation and passenger experience at LiveFromALounge.com, and Tweets at @LiveFromALounge.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.