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India has endured days of chaos at its airports after leading airline IndiGo suffered a critical shortage of cockpit crew, damaging the carrier’s reputation and the country’s image as an aspiring global aviation hub.
IndiGo, which controls about two-thirds of India’s domestic air traffic, said a scheduling and pilot crunch forced it to cancel “well over” 1,000 flights on Friday, leaving frustrated passengers stranded across the country.
The carrier had been cancelling up to 200 flights on previous days this week, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said. IndiGo informed the regulator that it was “facing significant transitional challenges in roster planning and crew availability” under pilot hour rules initiated last month, the DGCA said.
The tumult at IndiGo originated largely from new rules increasing weekly rest periods for pilots by 12 hours to 48 hours, while reducing night landings. IndiGo, which operates a domestic near-duopoly with Tata Group-owned Air India, said the cancellations arose primarily from “misjudgment and planning gaps”.
The DGCA said winter weather had compounded the disruption. The regulator temporarily relaxed some of the flight duty rules after IndiGo told the regulator it expected full operations to be restored by February 10. On Friday, the civil aviation ministry placed the flight duty rules in “abeyance with immediate effect”.
Unhappy with the DGCA’s decision to ease the rules for IndiGo, the Airline Pilots’ Association of India, a large pilots’ body, said the events raised “serious concerns that an artificial crisis was engineered to exert pressure on the government for commercial gain under the pretext of ‘public convenience’.”
In a video statement, IndiGo chief executive Pieter Elbers apologised for the disruption but said cancelling more than half the airline’s flights on Friday would help it to “start afresh” and pave the way for improvement.
“Earlier measures of the last few days, regrettably, have proven not to be enough, but we’ve decided today for a reboot of all our systems and schedules,” Elbers said.
IndiGo said it would begin cutting back scheduled flights next week to minimise future disruption. The airline has been widely lambasted for failing to prepare for the rules, which were first announced almost two years ago and have been rolled out gradually.
“They were working their pilots down to the bone,” said Mark Martin, chief executive of aviation advisory Martin Consulting. “They have shot themselves in the foot — it’s a complete breakdown of IndiGo’s system.”
At an emergency meeting with IndiGo’s management on Thursday, India’s civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu “expressed clear displeasure” and “stressed that ample preparatory time had been available to ensure a seamless transition to the new regulatory requirements”, according to a government statement.
The DGCA said on Friday evening that chaos caused by IndiGo indicated problems with “internal oversight, operational preparedness and compliance planning” and that it had launched an investigation into the “circumstances that led to such massive disruption”.
The crisis engulfing IndiGo caps a turbulent year for the country’s two main airlines. In June, an Air India plane slammed into the western Gujarati city of Ahmedabad shortly after take-off, killing more than 200 people in the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
Until this week, IndiGo was largely seen as a rare success story in India’s airline market. Over the past two decades, it has steadily grown to a dominant position with its lean, low-cost model outlasting a multitude of now grounded local airlines. The carrier’s expansion is also central to India’s international aviation ambitions as it rolls out new long-haul routes. Shares of InterGlobe Aviation, the carrier’s parent, have dropped 8.8 per cent over the past week.
On Friday, display screens at the domestic terminal of Kempegowda International airport in southern Bengaluru were lined red with IndiGo cancellations and delays, while more than 100 people queued at the airline’s customer service desk.
Nikhil, a 30-year-old credit analyst trying to return to Mumbai after a friend’s wedding, said both his original flight and a rebooked service had been cancelled. “I may have to take the road — that’s 20-plus hours, that’s something I don’t want to do.”
En route to Bengaluru airport with her husband, 24-year-old IT professional Nikhila Grandhi received an alert that their IndiGo flight to Shirdi in western India for a religious pilgrimage had been cancelled.
“This is not good . . . our grandparents are waiting for us,” she said. “I wish they solve the issue as soon as possible so that other people may not suffer like us.”
