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Graphical abstract Highlights • To identify the factors which impact the financial condition of airline companies in India. • To assess and prioritize these identified factors. • To provide managerial and practical insights on these factors. Abstract The aviation industry in India is on a growth path with annual passenger traffic growing at over fifteen percent. The government has backed this growth through the extensive development of airport infrastructure across the country. However, airline companies in India, periodically face financial distress as the internal and external environmental factors change dynamically. Company management, acting as the agent for all the stakeholders, needs to ensure that the distress condition does not develop into a bankruptcy situation. It needs to identify all those factors, which have a major impact on the financial condition of the company and monitor them continuously using various tools and techniques. These identified key factors could be from both the internal conditions of the company and from the external environment that the industry operates. By identifying these influencing factors early, management can take preventive measures before the distress condition becomes critical. Informed decisions can be taken when the value of these key parameters change over time. To identify and rank these key factors in terms of relative importance, this paper adopts a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach based on the technique of fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Processing (AHP). Robustness of the method is further tested through sensitivity analysis. The study finds that financial factors are the most critical and categorized as a major influence on the commercial stability of the airlines. Among these, operating revenue per air kilometer is the key variable for this sector. Operational factors, which are an indicator of the capacity and cost structure of the company, are ranked next, with the load factor taking the highest rank in this category. From the external environment aviation, fuel price per liter is ranked highest among all the factors and has a major impact on the profitability of the airline in India. Results also show that annual inflation and GDP growth rate in the country has a major influence on the sustainability of the airlines in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use simulation to analyze how flight routing network structure may change in different world regions, and how this might impact future traffic growth and emissions. We compare models of the domestic Indian and US air transportation systems, representing developing and mature air transportation systems respectively. We explicitly model passenger and airline decision-making, capturing passenger demand effects and airline operational responses, including airline network change. The models are applied to simulate air transportation system growth for networks of 49 airports in each country from 2005 to 2050. In India, the percentage of connecting passengers simulated decreases significantly (from over 40% in 2005 to under 10% in 2050), indicating that a shift in network structure towards increased point-to-point routing can be expected. In contrast, very little network change is simulated for the US airport set modeled. The simulated impact of network change on system CO 2 emissions is very small, although in the case of India it could enable a large increase in demand, and therefore a significant reduction in emissions per passenger (by nearly 25%). NO x emissions at major hub airports are also estimated, and could initially reduce relative to a case in which network change is not simulated (by nearly 25% in the case of Mumbai in 2025). This effect, however, is significantly reduced by 2050 because of frequency competition effects. We conclude that network effects are important when estimating CO 2 emissions per passenger and local air quality effects at hub airports in developing air transportation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: India’s aviation industry promises huge growth potential due to a large and growing middle class population, favourable demographics, rapid economic growth, higher disposable incomes, and overall low air transport penetration levels of less than 3%. However, the Indian Aviation Industry has been going through a turbulent phase over the past several years, facing multiple and prolonged difficulties through which carriers are continuously underperforming financially. After conducting a set of expert interviews backed by a statistical analysis of secondary data, this paper concludes that restrictions on foreign ownership, outdated regulatory policies and overtaxed fuel, overlain by industry wide overcapacity issues are the major contributing factors. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]