Airlines Urge Ministry to Protect Mumbai Airport Slots Ahead of Planned Capacity Cut
Why It MattersA dispute over who bears the cost of shifting traffic to a second Mumbai airport shows how slot rules can become a bargaining point whenever one operator redevelops a congested hub.
The Airline Operators Committee-Mumbai (AOC), which represents 46 of the 47 airlines operating at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA), has asked India's civil aviation ministry to protect existing flight slots. In an email dated November 2 to civil aviation secretary Samir Kumar Sinha, the committee said Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) had communicated the capacity reduction at an October 28 meeting "as a unilateral decision, without adequate justification or transparent disclosure of the actual available capacity at CSMIA."
MIAL plans to close Terminal 1 for redevelopment from April and shift 265 of Terminal 2's 770 weekly international departure slots to Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA), cutting the airport's annual passenger capacity by 5 million. Adani Airport Holdings runs both airports and is a partner in MIAL with the Airports Authority of India. IndiGo, Air India Express and Akasa Air have agreed to move some international flights, while foreign carriers including Emirates and Air France-KLM have sought until October 2027 to split operations, citing concerns over infrastructure and passenger demand at NMIA.
The AOC has asked the ministry to direct MIAL and the airport's slot coordinator to approve the historical slots existing airlines sought in their initial submissions for the summer 2027 schedule, ahead of the November 5 deadline for the Slot Allocation List. It also requested that no historical slots be denied, reduced, cancelled or reallocated unilaterally, without due process and adherence to Ministry of Civil Aviation and IATA slot guidelines. The move follows an earlier dispute over the relocation of international flights; ministry intervention last month and meetings on October 13 and 28 have failed to resolve the differences.
