Daybreak - Adani’s big plan to own Indian aviation: invest in everything but an airline

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning.From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business.India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack. Are the regulators keeping up?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Nine airports in eight years is the kind of expansion that makes you stop and think about the math twice. Three years before COVID struck, the Erdani group had no presence in Indian aviation. Today, it is the country's largest private airport operator. And the group has announced plans to put another one-lack-crow rupees into airports over the next five years. But the scale of that expansion is only a part of the story. The more interesting part is what Adani is doing once it owns the airport. Take what happened at Navi Mumbai. Akasa Air, which is a 4-year-old airline,

was getting ready to launch operations there in 2025. Standard procedure when you start at a new airport is you bring your existing ground handling team. For Akasa, that is, Bird Worldwide Flight Services. They already work with Bird at 15 airports across India because having the same provider in multiple locations keeps the costs predictable. But when it came to doing the same at Navi Mumbai, Akasa hit a roadblock. Approvals for Bird simply did not come through. What was available though was AGH Port Aviation, which is Adani's own ground handling company, which the group had picked up just a few months earlier in December. So ultimately, Akasa flew but on Adani's terms. Actually, Navi Mumbai

is a good place to understand what Adani is building. The airport is 2,800 acres big. It was built from scratch. Interestingly, it is the only one in Adani's portfolio that was. It can handle 20 million passengers a year to start with. And it has India's largest planned general aviation facility with over 67 parking bays and a dedicated heliport. A senior executive at the Flight Simulation Technique Center, which is a pilot training firm where Adani holds a controlling stake, said it directly to my colleague, the Ken reporter Noha Biberik. They said, when people think of aviation, they should think of Adani. Airports are just the entry point. The group is now in aircraft maintenance, pilot training, ground handling, air charter and defense aerospace. One executive at Karnavati

Aviation, Adani's private charter arm put it this way. The goal is a presence across the entire aviation life cycle, everything except running an airline. And that is a meaningful difference because what it creates is something that India has not seen before. A single company that does not just host airlines, but increasingly sets the conditions under which they operate. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Dharma and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday the 21st of May.

The airport opportunity for Adani was not a matter of sheer luck. It came from policy. In the 2000s, the Airport Authority of India decided to bring in private players. GMR infrastructure took Delhi and GVK Group took Mumbai. Both of them spent a decade turning those airports into real businesses. Adani only came in later but moved very fast. And the approach made sense given where he had already been. He had started with ports back in 1998.

And over time, Adani built a portfolio of over 15 ports handling roughly a quarter of all cargo moving through India. The airport model kind of rhymes with that. own the infrastructure and collect from everyone who needs to use it. What Adani did differently though was pick his geography carefully. Tier 2 and tier 3 cities like Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Jaipur, Gohati, Trinandrum, Mangaluru. The major metros you see were already packed and smaller cities was where the growth runway was much longer. The numbers also backed that up.

In the third quarter of the financial year 2026, Adani Airports Division posted revenues of over 3,700 crore rupees, and that is 28% higher than the same period the year before. And that growth is coming from two directions. More passengers and more money poor passenger through retail duty-free food and beverages. In fact, even global projections add fuel to this. Air travel demand is expected to more than double by 2050 with the Asia-Pacific region growing at a compound annual growth rate of 3.8%. More flights means more revenue even without raising a single tariff. So the group has been building out every adjacent revenue stream that it can reach.

Aircraft maintenance is one of them. Adani acquired Airworks in 2025 and then in Damo Technics in 2026 and merged the two into a single maintenance repair and overhauling. or MRO operation. Every aircraft that is flying in India needs a two to four-day maintenance window at an MRO facility. Margins on engine overhauls run at 15 to 20%. And when you own the land that the MRO sits on, as Adani does, those margins go up further. And then there is pilot training.

Last November, Adani Defence finalized the acquisition of a 73% stake at the flight simulation. Technology Center for 820 crore. This center runs the largest pilot simulation network in India. Its simulators are also used for the Air Force. And each hour of simulator time costs airlines or pilots 40,000 to 50,000 rupees. India's aviation policy already prioritizes domestic flights, which means demand for this training is policy-backed. In February this year, Adani Defense and Aerospace signed a deal with Brazilian manufacturer Embraer

to set up a regional transport aircraft assembly line in India by 2008, and land near Dolera in Gujarat has already been secured for this. So when you put it all together, you see the logic clearly. As one Adani airport's holding executive described it to Noaha, the approach is to have a hand in every pool of money, every line of revenue available. But there is a structural problem. More on that in the next segment. As you all know, airports are fixed by geography.

An airline serving Navi Mumbai has one airport to land at. When the operator of that airport also controls ground handling, maintenance and pilot supply, the airline's room to negotiate collapses. Let's try to understand this better through pricing. Say, if Delhi's GMR operated airport charges $1,000 per passenger for the full bundle of services, handling baggage fuel and Adani, as the single provider of all those same services at Navi Mumbai charges 1,600, the airline has to absorb that gap. Three airport development executives told the ken that this kind of premium has broadly been the experience with all of four.

Fadani's airports. Now, you might think, what about regulations? Well, regulators do cap some charges. Airport operators propose the rate and authorities approve it, so there is a ceiling. But the system still tilts towards the operator. And critically, the regulatory oversight that makes integrated models work in other countries is thinner in India. Look at Dubai, for example. Dinata is the only ground handling agency at Dubai Airport. It is owned by Dubai airports itself. The model works because the fees are tightly regulated and the service quality is globally benchmarked. Without that institutional framework, the same structure becomes a different thing entirely.

The international pressure also is already landing actually. In March, the US Department of Transportation pushed back against Adani's moved to shift cargo carriers to Navi Mumbai, citing treaty concerns. The International Air Transport Association separately flagged pricing concerns around a proposed VIP terminal at the airport. No Indian airport has attempted this kind of fully integrated model before. And the conditions that allow it to work internationally, which is mature regulations, strong labor frameworks, independent oversight, are still developing in our country.

country. Adani is the live test case and everyone in Indian aviation is watching to see what gets built and what gets squeezed in this process. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcast. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleagues Niktha Sharma and edited by

Rajiv CN.