IndiGo takes the Middle East route to fly past Air India

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Editor's note: Which Indian airline has the largest share of traffic into and out of India? Curiously, both Campbell Wilson, the chief executive officer and managing director of Air India, and Pieter Elbers, the chief executive officer of IndiGo, will be correct if they claim the honour for their airline.  Air India and its low-cost unit Air India Express jointly carried 21.2% of the 5.5 million international passengers who flew into India in the first quarter of the current fiscal year. Their share was 20.7% of the outbound international traffic.  But when you separate them into individual entities, a new leader emerges: IndiGo. The country’s largest airline had a 15.6% share of the inbound and a 14.6% share of the outbound international traffic over the same three months. The number for Air India was 12.2% for both inbound and outbound traffic.  This is a set of numbers that would surprise many in the Indian aviation industry, which has witnessed IndiGo’s overwhelming dominance over the domestic market, where it has a share of 58%. It was generally perceived that Air India—especially after the …