Daybreak - Akasa Air has the best seat in Indian aviation. It just can't find a place to park

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Akasa Air wants to be India's most efficient low-cost carrier. Founded in 2022 by veterans who watched Jet Airways and Go Air collapse, the airline is copying IndiGo's early playbook — single aircraft type, ruthless cost discipline, long-term thinking. It has 35 planes, 5% market share, and serious backing from the Jhunjhunwala family. But Boeing strikes delayed deliveries, pilots left, two co-founders have exited, and airport slots remain locked up by bigger players. Meanwhile, IndiGo is stumbling and Air India is still reeling from last year’s tragedy. Can Akasa turn everyone else's bad year into its own breakthrough?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.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the same. secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they managed to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into.

to the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert, as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast. or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode.

India has a graveyard of airlines. Kingfisher, Jet Airways, Go Air Deccan, all of them walked in with big dreams and a bigger bond rate. In 2010, there was six airlines in India. Today, there are only four. So when a brand new airline showed up in 2022, right in the middle of a post-COVID rebound with no legacy network, no grandfather slots, and a founder who had watched multiple airlines collapse from the inside,

the obvious question was, why would anyone try this? Meet Akasa Air. Backed by the late billionaire Rakeh Junjunewala, Manipal Group's Ranjan Pai, and seasoned aviation veterans who had lived through the wreckage of jet and go air firsthand, Akasa launched with one clear idea. Build slow, build right and build to last a hundred years. In its first year, the airline ordered 226 planes. It started flying internationally within two years of launch, something that used to take airlines at least five years to do. Today, it holds nearly 5% of India's domestic market running 140 to 150 flights a day. Now, that sounds modest until you

consider what is happening to everyone else. You will remember how Indigo, the 65% market share giant, just cancelled over 4,500 flights in December, stranding nearly a million passengers. Air India is still absorbing the fallout from last year's Ahmedabad crash and a messy merger with Vistara. Spicejet seems permanently one crisis away from shutting down. For Akasa, the timing feels almost cinematic. But here's the thing. Akasa is dealing with its own set of turbulence, delayed planes, departing co-founders and airports where it can barely find a place to park. So the real question is not whether Akasa can survive the chaos around it, it is whether it can outrun it. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Dhar Sharma, and I Don't

Chase the New Cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 12th of March. Akasa's CEO, Vene Dube, says something that will stop you in your tracks. He says the foundation of Akasa has been built by copying other smart players. Now, for an airline that is trying to carve its own identity, that is a bold thing to admit. But Dubai is deliberate about it. Single aircraft type, single engine type, single cabin and no complex sense.

no sprawl. The playbook looks a lot like early Indigo, and that is entirely the point. The management trial behind Akasa knew exactly what breaks an airline. Dube spent three decades with American and Delta Airlines before moving through Jet and Co-Air. The co-founder, Aditya Ghosh, ran Indigo for a decade, and CFO Uncle Goel helped take Indigo public in 2015. These are people who have seen the insight. of both success and spectacular failure. Their core obsession is cost, specifically cost-poor-available seat kilometer, that is, how much it costs to fly one seat for one kilometer.

The lower that number, the healthier the airline. Indigo is the industry benchmark. Akasa is gunning for it. Doewe declined to share the exact figures with my colleague, the Ken reporter Noha Buberi, but he said that they are tracking well against internal. targets. Aviation analyst Gagan Dixit from Ellara Capital confirms that the approach mirrors Indigo's early strategy. Keep the model clean, keep the costs down and grow with discipline. To keep costs sling, Akasa chose Boeing 737 Max over Airbus A320. Indigo had already locked up much of the

A320 order book and the max offered 2 to 3% better fuel efficiency per seat in certain configuration along with a strong maintenance deal through Engine Maker CFM International. At the time, Boeing was rebuilding trust after the max crashes of 2018 and 19 and was offering competitive commercial terms to win back airline confidence. Also, the investor base gave Akasa room to think long. The Junjunwala family, despite losing Rakeh Junjunwalah within a week of the airline's first flight, stayed in. They remained the largest shareholders,

holding around 35% as of early 2026. Clayporn Capital, Premji Invest and 361 round out the backing. Saker Garisa from Claypon put it plainly to my colleague Noha. They said punctuality is no longer a differentiator. Sustainable margins and genuine customer service are. And that is the gap that Akasa wants to fill. And here is where the story gets complicated. Stay tuned.

In August 2024, Boeing's machinists went on a strike. The strike lasted over 100 days and hit Akasa's delivery schedule pretty hard. The airline had been promised around 50 aircrafts by March 2025. And that target slipped significantly. Akasa had already hired and trained a large roster of pilots in anticipation of a growing fleet. When the planes did not arrive, at least 43 of those trained pilots walked out, straight to Air India Express. Boeing has since stabilized and is delivering two planes a month to Akasa. The airline now has 35 aircrafts. And to stay ahead of future demand, Akasa has already

posted vacancies for first officers. It won't need for another three years at least. It is also building an in-house pilot training program, modelling it on Indigo's approach. The airline's leadership side has also taken some hits. Co-founder Praveen Ayur, who led network planning as chief commercial officer exited in February. He was the second senior departure in four months following Nilo Khatri, co-founder and head of international operations. Now, these are not small losses. Both were architects of how the airline was built.

And then there is the slot problem, and it may be the most structural challenge that Akasa faces. You see, airport parking bays in India are largely held by older established carriers. Indigo alone holds 20 slots in Mumbai. Akasa has around 30 in Mumbai and 20 in Delhi out of a combined 364. So to grow beyond those limits, Akasa is looking where others are not. New terminals, Greenfield airports and secondary cities. The new Gohati terminal, for example. The upcoming airports in Navi Mumbai and Noida as well. These are all calculated bets on where aviation capacity in India is actually expanding.

Dubai is clear-eyed about the geometry of the market. Indigo's December fiasco forced the airline to give up roughly 10% of its roots. Akasa wants those roots. But wanting them and being able to fly them are two different things. You need the planes and the slots to make it work. Dobe sums up his philosophy with a line that sounds simple but is actually quite precise. He says, when you're being chased by a bear, you don't think. outrun the bear, you just need to

outrun the people next to you. Right now, a lot of people next to Akasa are stumbling. So, the airline just needs to keep finding its footing. 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 podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague,

Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.