Which Are India’s Main Airlines?

India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and one of the fasts growing aviation markets. Pre-covid the Indian subcontinent was experiencing continuous year on year passenger number growth. Although it must be said that most growth was domestic market centered. So, in this post we’ll be looking more in detail to which are India’s main airlines and their focus.

The Big 2 Full-Service Airlines in India Are Now One

Although India sheer size and population are daunting, the country is home to only one full-service airline. This reflects significantly how demand is still focused on domestic flights and very little towards overseas connections. In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, the split between domestic and international passengers flown was 75% to 25%.

Prior to 2024 the big two players in the full-service segment of the Indian aviation market were:

• Air India
• Vistara

The latter filled the void left by Jet Airways’ bankruptcy as a joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines. However, in 2024 these two carriers merged under the TATA ownership to form the only full-service carrier in the country. Air India was the name that remained while Vistara’s legacy remained in the new frequent flyer program.

The Huge Budget Airline Market – A Driving Force Expanding Beyond India

Moving away from the 2 full service airlines we move into the extremely dynamic and cutthroat segment of India’s low-cost airlines. The airlines cater specifically to a large chunk of the population with they no frills, cheap and on time flights approach.

These are the country’s low cost airlines ordered by fleet size:

• IndiGo (423 Planes)
• SpiceJet (51 Planes)
• Akasa Air (26 Planes)

Just to give you an idea of how big the first airline of the list, IndiGo, is its’ fleet of 423 planes is more than twice as big as Air india’s. There used to be two more low-cost carriers in India, which have over the past post-2020 years gone out of business, they are:

• GoAir/GoFirst
• Air Asia India

GoFirst went completely out of business with one of the contributing factors being the delay in deliveries and grounding of much of its fleet affected by P&W GTF engine issues. While Akasa and SpiceJet don’t push themselves beyond the middle east in terms of network, IndiGo has started tapping into long range operations using wet leased planes while it waits for its first very own wide body planes to arrive. Later this year it will be starting direct flights from India to Manchester and Amsterdam using leased Norse Atlantic Boeing 787s.

AirAsia India instead disappeared as it was also acquired by the TATA group with its operations mergin into the Air India group. Last of all AkasaAir was just recently founded in the summer of 2022. Akasa Air also only operates domestically.