Media365
Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA), which was inaugurated in October last year and started operations on Christmas last year, will see the start of international operations. Six months after the commencement of operations, the airport will begin international services, with Air India Express becoming the first carrier to offer international flights as it launches a thrice-weekly service to Abu Dhabi from the newly constructed airport. This will mark a significant milestone for the airport, which hopes to ease capacity constraints in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
The airport made it to the top 10 airports in the country by passenger footfall in April and saw even more passengers in May. The lack of capacity at Mumbai for years has given Navi Mumbai a free pass to grow, but its growth will also depend on factors such as connectivity between the airport and the city, which has come under fire and is outside the control of the airport operator.
Who is starting International operations?
Air India’s subsidiary, Air India Express, started international operations from July 15, connecting the new airport with Abu Dhabi thrice a week. Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 shows that the airline planned to deploy the B737 MAX 8 with registration VT-RNT, a tribute to Ratan Tata, for the first flight.
The success of the flight will be measured not just in terms of profitability and passenger numbers, but beyond that. Current operations at CSMIA, Mumbai’s legacy airport, are split across two terminals, with connection times varying based on the arrival and departure terminals. NMIA has been built with the concept of “everything under the same roof” and currently has a single terminal. The ability to connect faster at Navi Mumbai would help convince airlines to shift some, if not all, of their operations to NMIA, allowing them to offer more and more connections. The long-term goal of making NMIA a transit hub would also get a boost, especially with airspace around Delhi constrained due to airspace closures by Pakistan.
A delayed start
IndiGo and Akasa Air have been at the forefront of announcements since 2025. In June 2025, Akasa Air announced 100+ weekly domestic departures initially, with a planned scale-up to over 300 domestic and 50 international departures in the winter schedule of 2025. However, the airport did not start operations in 2025. IndiGo was the first to make announcements, with plans for 79 daily departures, including 14 international ones, by November 2025, subsequently rising to 100+ daily departures, including 30 international ones, by November 2026. Both announcements were made before the crash of AI 171 at Ahmedabad.
As things stand today, there are 333 weekly departures from NMIA, according to data obtained from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, exclusively for this article. A significant 288 of these are operated by IndiGo, while Akasa Air has 15 weekly flights and Air India Express has 30 flights, including the three flights to Abu Dhabi. Currently, all airlines have scaled down operations during the lean period. The number of flights is expected to increase towards September and beyond.
Tail Note
The success of the initial international operations from NMIA will act as a confidence booster for airlines to shift flights from CSMIA, the existing airport, to NMIA. Freighter operations are also slated to move from CSMIA to NMIA soon, as expansion and modernisation work at CSMIA will lead to a reduction in capacity.
There have been quite a few greenfield airports that have started operations in the recent past, with the major ones being Goa-Mopa, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. While Bengaluru and Hyderabad saw a complete shift of operations from the old airports to the new ones, Goa-Mopa is the second airport in Goa. For all of these airports, the challenge has been road and metro connectivity from the city centre. While private airport developers have fast-tracked airport construction, the relevant authorities have taken time to put metro connectivity and road expansion in place. For Navi Mumbai Airport, better road connectivity is on the horizon, and that may tilt the balance in its favour. With only a handful of airports in India handling international services, it may not be long before NMIA enters the top 10 list on the international front as well.
