Navi Mumbai International Airport opens for commercial operations: A guide to all the airlines operating
Navi Mumbai International Airport commenced operations on December 25, 2025. Airlines like IndiGo and Akasa Air plan to increase their services significantly by February 2026, despite initial operational challenges and delays in capacity expansion.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport began operations on 25 December 2025, with the arrival of its first commercial flight. The airport was inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi on 8 October this year. The airport will add a significant boost to the capacity needed for Mumbai, which lost its number-one position in traffic to Delhi in 2008-09, as Delhi continued to expand while Mumbai lacked sufficient land to expand or add a parallel runway.
NMIA is starting with 23 scheduled daily departures, scaling up to 34 departures from February 2026. IndiGo, Akasa Air, and Air India Express will commence operations from NMIA on the first day of service.
In the first month, the airport will operate only for 12 hours, between 0800 hours and 2000 hours, managing up to 10 flight movements per hour. Currently, NMIA is conducting comprehensive Operational Readiness and Airport Transfer (ORAT) trials, having formally inducted the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) on 29 October 2025.
Earlier announcements made by airlines seemed like a grand opening for NMIA, but the tone appears more muted with scaled growth as we approach the operationalisation of the much-needed capacity in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
Inaugural flight
IndiGo flight 6E460 from Bengaluru became the airport’s first commercial arrival at 8.00 am, receiving a ceremonial water cannon salute. The inaugural departure followed soon after, with IndiGo flight 6E882 to Hyderabad taking off at 8.40 am, completing NMIA’s first arrival, departure cycle.
IndiGo will connect NMIA to Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, North Goa (Mopa), Jaipur, Nagpur, Cochin, and Mangalore, offering 67 weekly frequencies, a far cry from its earlier announcement of starting with 18 daily departures to 15 destinations, which it had made in May 2025.
Akasa Air will commence operations with daily flights to Delhi and Goa-Mopa, followed by flights to Kochi and a single weekly flight to Ahmedabad by the end of December. The airline, however, plans to progressively ramp up operations from NMIA, scaling up to 300 domestic and 50 international flights per week. As part of its broader network strategy, the airline is also set to ramp up to 10 parking bases by the end of FY2027, with a focused international expansion into key Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian markets. The plan is remarkably different from what it had announced. In June 2025, Akasa Air announced that it would commence NMIA operations with more than 100 weekly domestic departures.
Air India Express is commencing operations at NMIA with daily flights to Bengaluru and five times a week to Delhi, scaling up to 12 weekly flights to Delhi and doubling the daily flights to Bengaluru in January. The airline, which was the last of the three to announce the NMIA operations, stated that it would initially operate 20 daily departures to 15 cities.
Interestingly, these destinations are all private airports or Joint Ventures with none being operated by state-owned AAI. Airlines have little to blame in this case since the airport was initially expected to start operations in 2024. With a supply chain crunch, airlines cannot adjust their capacity to match the opening of the airport, which is delayed. The airport has also been battling challenges towards completion. While both NMIA and Jewar were initially announced to begin operations in 2024, NMIA has started operations, but there is no clarity on when Jewar will see commercial operations or even its inauguration.
What next?
The airport is expected to transition to round-the-clock operations from February 2026, when it expects 34 daily departures. There is no word yet on when the international operations will start. While operationally on the air side, international flights require minimal preparation; however, a significant amount of preparation needs to be put in place in the terminal, where Customs and Immigration services must be thoroughly tested.
The peak season is expected to occur towards the end of this quarter, and additional growth for Mumbai is anticipated in Summer 2026, when NMIA will be available around the clock, and the season is expected to justify this growth. With such visibility, airlines can now plan more effectively to increase capacity at the right time.