By Rohit Vaid
New Delhi, Aug 31 (IANS): Despite Covid blues, India's civil aviation sector has shown signs of revival in passenger traffic growth as well as registered aircraft in the country.
Accordingly, the Chief of the country's civil aviation regulator in an inter action with IANS cited factors such as passengers' rising confidence levels in the bio-safety measures for air travel along with the general pro gression made towards the revival of economic activity to have triggered the growth momentum of the sector.
"Even though there are many mixed signals, current traffic trends do suggest a revival," DGCA Director General Arun Kumar told IANS.
"Off-late, we have seen a sequential growth in passenger traffic num bers. We expect this trend to continue in August with a total of 3 million passengers being ferried."
Last month, traffic grew sequentially to 21.07 lakh from 19.84 lakh which was reported for June 2020.
However, traffic remained deep in the red on a year-on-year basis during July as it plunged by more than 82 per cent to 21.07 lakh from 1.19 crore, ferried during the corresponding period of the previous year.
According to Kumar, economic effects of Covid-19 outbreak along with regional lockdowns have impacted passenger numbers.
Nonetheless, he pointed-out that temporary pent-up demand is slowly converting into a sustainable trend which would further gain traction during the upcoming festive season.
"We expect the sector to reach last year's per month passenger traffic figures by October-November," he explained.
"It is too early to predict the final traffic numbers for the year 2020 but some positive movement is expected during the last quarter of the calendar year."
Furthermore, Kumar pointed out that a positive trend in aircraft induction has been noticed and the country now h as 661 registered aircraft.
"Few airlines have gone ahead and inducted aircraft into their fleet. The trend becomes more evident, if seen from the period from March-to-August," he revealed.
"This shows that the industry definitely sees future growth potential in India's aviation sector."
On a net-basis, airlines have inducted over 10 aircraft during the period.