Editorial: Flying high on paper

NEW DELHI: The Airports Authority of India has been conducting biannual Customer Satisfaction Surveys for several years to evaluate and gauge passenger sentiment across several parameters.

A few airports have consistently dominated the rankings. This year, Khajuraho Airport in Madhya Pradesh topped the list of about 60 tier-2 and tier-3 airports across the country. Other airports with impressive scores in recent years include Bhopal, Hubballi and Belagavi in Karnataka, Udaipur in Rajasthan, Prayagraj and Bareilly in UP, Raipur in Chhattisgarh, Amritsar in Punjab, and Dehradun in Uttarakhand.

Many of these better-performing airports incidentally cater to tourism and commercial or industrial hubs, managing higher footfalls, unlike several others that are proving unviable and requiring government support.

The survey paints a rosy picture of smaller, regional airports operated and maintained by the public sector AAI. Several of these airports seem to be outperforming the expectations of mostly high-income, elite passengers across a wide range of parameters, including passenger facilities, cleanliness, staff behaviour, and overall hospitality. The survey captures critical operational feedback from passengers, which can be used to further improve services. Secondly, it helps identify service gaps that authorities can take appropriate steps to fix. Furthermore, being a biannual survey, the results of round one help in course correction and improvement for round two.

However, a closer look at the survey results reveals certain methodological issues. The use of a 5-point scale — with some airports scoring a near-perfect 4.99 or 5.0 points — to a lack of granularity that larger scales provide, potentially leading to skewed inferences or exaggerated results with little distinction, for instance, between good and exceptional levels.

Another problem with these surveys is that they are conducted face-to-face with passengers who tend to be in a hurry or are often reluctant to give critical feedback out of politeness, resulting in inflated scores. It would help if authorities shared not only individual parameters but also how over 30 parameters are consolidated into a single score.

The BJP-led NDA government has pumped thousands of crores of rupees into developing a network of regional airports.

While some of these airports are doing well, many have proven unviable due to a lack of commercial demand. The Ministry of Civil Aviation’s ambitious and much-publicised Regional Connectivity Scheme - UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik) has suffered setbacks. Of the 73 unserved or underserved airports, commercial operations at 15 were shut down due to issues ranging from low demand to technical and operational challenges.

In some cases, feasibility reports may not have forecast future passenger traffic accurately. Another problem is sanctioning airports due to extraneous political or electoral considerations. Eyebrows are being raised about the development of a greenfield airport under the UDAN scheme in Palasa in Srikakulam district, the constituency of Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu. Demand projections for the initial years are likely to be modest and erratic, and one cannot rule out the danger of it becoming a vanity project and a white elephant sustained by subsidies.

Undoubtedly, the regional airport network is critical for the overall and balanced development of the country’s civil aviation industry. A more realistic, detailed project report (DPR) with credible traffic forecasts and a pragmatic approach will ensure higher success rates.