MIAL wants airlines to name Mumbai slots for surrender by today

Airlines at Mumbai have until today to tell Mumbai International Airport Ltd which international departure slots they will surrender at Terminal 2. If they do not name them, MIAL can choose. The Indian Express, cited by the Financial Express, puts the cut at about 265 of the roughly 770 weekly international departures now on the T2 board, a reduction of about a third, starting 25 October.

The split by carrier is uneven. IndiGo is in line to lose 74 weekly international departures. Air India is in line to lose 33. Akasa Air is down for 11, Air India Express for 7, SpiceJet for 5. Emirates and Etihad are each marked for a cut of 10 weekly departures. Those are the figures carriers have been shown, not a final board. The point of the 6 October deadline is to force a choice before MIAL imposes one.

The slots are being cleared because domestic flying is being pushed toward Navi Mumbai International Airport while T2 and the older Terminal 1 are rebuilt. MIAL has told the airlines that about a third of the affected domestic operation moves first, another third follows, and the domestic shift should be complete by January 2027. A new Terminal 1 is talked about for 2029-30. In the meantime about 10 million passengers a year would stay on the existing T1, and about five million a year in the northern section of T1B are in the affected pool. T1 currently handles nearly 950 flights a day.

Carriers have objected on operational grounds, not on the existence of the new airport. A slot is a right to a departure time that locks an aircraft, a crew and a connection. Moving it to a second airport twenty kilometres across the harbour breaks the rotation. A long-haul arrival at CSMIA that feeds a domestic bank at NMIA needs a passenger transfer the city does not yet have as a reliable airside product. Air France-KLM has opposed splitting long-haul flying between the two airports for that reason. Challenge Group has suspended Mumbai cargo operations, citing uncertainty about NMIA's reliability.

IATA wrote to the civil aviation ministry last month against what it called a forced relocation. Its argument is the standard one: the airline, not the airport company, should decide which flights move, because the airline holds the bilateral rights, the crew base and the maintenance approval. IATA also asked whether NMIA is ready on ground handling, maintenance sign-off, catering, cargo, crew hotels and surface access. Those are the unglamorous items that decide whether a first wave of flights can actually leave.

The ministry has a parallel process. It has asked airlines for a plan to shift operations from CSMIA to NMIA, with a meeting set for 13 October and a further discussion in the last week of the month to settle the transition. That is a different clock from MIAL's 6 October slot deadline. One is a company notice about which departures disappear from T2 on 25 October. The other is a government meeting about how the network moves. Carriers now have both in the same fortnight.

The passenger consequence is concrete. An international departure cut of 265 a week is roughly 38 a day, before freighters. Some of those passengers will be offered NMIA. Some will be retimed. Some will be dropped until the new airport's handling contracts are in place. Connections that now work inside T2, international to domestic on one ticket, are the flights most exposed to a split-airport operation.

What today's deadline decides is who chooses the lost slots. If IndiGo names 74 flights it can spare, those are the ones that go. If it does not, MIAL's list applies. The same choice sits with Air India, Emirates and the smaller Indian carriers. The 13 October meeting with the ministry is where the industry will try to reopen a decision the airport company wants closed tonight.