Indian Airport Operations

Over the last 3 weeks, I flew 8 times through 6 airports with 3 domestic airlines for personal and work-related trips.  Due to circumstances, I usually arrived hours early for my flight and had the opportunity to observe operations at 2 major and 4 smaller airports.  While Delhi and Mumbai airports processed people much in the fashion of US and other international departure points, I found the system at the smaller airports particularly intriguing.  

Rather than continuously accepting passengers through the system, passengers are processed in batches.  When I arrived more than 1.5 hours prior to my flight, I was allowed through the first checkpoint into the airport but had to wait in a holding area prior to check-in.  Announcements were made when you could move through each step of the process:  check-in, security, and boarding.  After check-in, if your flight has not moved to the security process, you must once again wait in another holding area. 

This system works for the smaller airports because it allows them to control where passengers of a certain flight are at any given point.  It also minimizes the number of staff and parts of the airport that need to be open since flights were also clustered.  I arrived 4 hours early for my flight out of Vadodara, and the airport was all but shut down.  While I was thankfully allowed through the first checkpoint into the airport, the lights in the check-in and security areas were off with no employees in sight.  Only 1 guard was needed to ensure that passengers did not move into the check-in area.  Waiting passengers had only electric fans for cooling.  The air conditioning was only turned on when the check-in process started.  

By herding passengers of each flight through the processing system together, it also makes it simpler for the employees too.  It limited the number of destinations that check-in baggage would have to go, and with only a couple gates available, it limited the confusion of passengers of which flight was boarding.  I wonder if this system would work in a small airport in the US, e.g. White Plains-Westchester (HPN) airport, that really only has 2 gates and passengers in the single, large waiting area are always confused as to which flight is being boarded at which gate, resulting to passengers attempting to get on the wrong flight.  

At the Delhi and Mumbai airports, I also appreciated the busing system.  Instead of building a large structure with concourses and individual gates, domestic passengers boarded buses that took them to planes that parked away from the main terminal.  As the passengers were bussed in batches, it allowed the passengers from each bus to settle in their seats before the next bus came, rather than continuously adding passengers into the system causing the backup in the jetways that normally happens on US domestic flights.  Thankfully, I haven’t experienced this system in the rain – I imagine that it becomes much more chaotic and wet during a downpour.  

One thing that I do think that India Airport Authority should look into is minimizing the amount of paper used.  For each flight, I needed a printed itinerary in order to be let into the airport at all.  If you did not have one, you could pay for one to be printed at the ticketing office.  No e-itineraries on a mobile phone were accepted.  In addition to the physical boarding pass issued (no mobile boarding issued because security has to stamp it), each carry-on item has to have a tag which gets stamped by security.  After my recent whirlwind tour of Gujarat and Rajasthan, I amassed a lot of paper that had to be thrown away.  While I'm sure India will come on board with accepting e-boarding passes and such soon, US airports should take a look at the operations at their Indian counterparts as well.