Adani cuts a third of Mumbai's international flights, then gets summoned to Delhi

Mumbai's international gateway is about to shrink by a third — and it was not the airlines, the passengers, or the government who ordered it. Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL), controlled by Adani Airport Holdings, has told 46 airlines that 265 of the 770 weekly international departure slots at Terminal 2 will be temporarily discontinued from October 25, the start of the winter schedule. The slots, the operator says, are needed to absorb domestic flights displaced by the redevelopment of Terminal 1, whose ageing north section will be demolished in January 2027. Adani Airports says the redevelopment will temporarily affect about five million passengers a year and that "passenger safety must remain paramount". The airlines are not buying it. Their first objection is arithmetic: the winter schedule was approved in June, networks and aircraft deployment are locked in, and 35 to 40 percent of seats on November and December flights from Mumbai are already sold. A slot "transfer" to the new Navi Mumbai airport, 50 km away across the trans-harbour link, became, in their telling, a straight cut — roughly 34 percent of international departures pulled out of Mumbai altogether. The Airline Operators Committee has asked MIAL for the capacity calculations behind the number; the transition plan, reviewed by Mint, does not set out the demand-capacity analysis. Their second objection is process. A July 30 consultation meeting was convened without an agenda; a September 16 meeting called to discuss the T1 timeline instead focused on shifting T2 flights to Navi Mumbai. Then MIAL set a 4 pm deadline on Tuesday, October 6, for airlines to identify which slots they would voluntarily surrender — or the operator would choose for them. European carriers have flagged legal exposure under EU passenger-rights rules, which guarantee refund and rebooking rights regardless of the cause. The Civil Aviation Ministry has now stepped in, calling a meeting on October 6 with airlines, Adani and industry body IATA, chaired by Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha. That is the real story: the government had to be dragged into a room to arbitrate a decision that a private airport operator took unilaterally over a public utility. Mumbai's airport was privatised on the promise of efficiency and investment. But privatisation also concentrated power: Adani controls both Mumbai's existing airport and the Navi Mumbai airport that is supposed to be the alternative. When one company owns the airport, the backup airport, and the timetable, "temporary" cuts look less like capacity management and more like a landlord deciding how many tenants the building needs. The passengers will learn which flights survive only after the standoff ends. The workers at travel agencies who have already blocked and paid for seats are left in limbo. And the redevelopment, when finished, will add capacity — a 20-million-passenger-a-year Terminal 1, up from 15 million. The question hanging over the October 25 deadline is simpler: who gets to decide, in the meantime, that a third of Mumbai's connection to the world is expendable?