150 IndiGo flights cancelled as roster norms rock airline

Indigo Flight Cancellation: The airline apologised for the crippling disruption and warned travellers to brace for further cancellations through Friday.

Indigo Flight Cancellation: IndiGo cancelled at least 150 flights on Wednesday, triggering chaotic scenes at major airports across India as the carrier’s struggles to adapt to stringent new crew rostering rules meant even minor operational disruptions snowballed into a full-blown crisis that stranded thousands of passengers.

Queues at IndiGo counters at the Bengaluru airport on Wednesday. (REUTERS)

The airline apologised for the crippling disruption and warned travellers to brace for further cancellations through Friday, saying it had initiated “calibrated adjustments” to stabilise operations over the next 48 hours.

“We acknowledge that IndiGo’s operations have been significantly disrupted across the network for the past two days, and we sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused,” an airline spokesperson said, attributing the debacle to a confluence of factors including technology glitches, adverse weather, increased congestion and the implementation of updated Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) that came into force in November.

The immediate trigger, however, was an emergency Airbus A320 software patch rushed through over the weekend of November 29-30 that disrupted crew scheduling just as the airline was operating with minimal slack due to the FDTL rules. Data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) shows the airline had already been under strain, having cancelled 1,232 flights in November—755 of them attributed to FDTL issues—with on-time performance dropping to 67.70% from 84.1% in October.

Compounding the aviation chaos, IndiGo’s baggage systems at Delhi’s Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 encountered problems on Wednesday. “While the issue at T3 was minor, T1 faced severe issues starting at around 1.30pm and going up to around 6pm,” a government official said, adding that the baggage system had trouble providing information. The airline did not comment on this aspect but several passengers stated ground crews were unavailable.

Turmoil erupted at airports in across the country with scenes of mounting passenger anger. At least 67 flights were cancelled at Delhi airport (37 departures and 30 arrivals), 42 at Bengaluru, 40 at Hyderabad (19 departures and 21 arrivals) and 33 at Mumbai (17 departures and 16 arrivals), according to airport officials. Social media was flooded with videos showing frustrated passengers remonstrating with airline staff.

IndiGo flyers across the country had similar experiences, with flights simply scrapped as they turned up to check in. “We’ve been told that there’s a flight only after 5.30am on Thursday. We don’t stay in Delhi and they have not given us any accommodation,” said 76-year-old Gautam Patil in Delhi, who spent 40 hours travelling from Chicago with his 73-year-old wife, and were due to fly to Ahmedabad.

Many said they missed onward connections. “I lost two connecting flights to Kochi because of this,” said Neha Mulay in Pune, who was set to travel on a Bengaluru-bound flight at 5.55am before it was delayed for four hours and then cancelled.

Mohil Manish Shah, one of the passengers who travelled from Delhi to Mumbai in 6E-664 on Monday, said his flight was delayed for five hours and the airline staff kept the passengers uninformed. “When I reached Gate 34 at 5:45 pm, the gate agents informed me the flight was delayed by 15 minutes. This message kept repeating without any transparency. When passengers sought clarity, a customer representative stated one crew member had been called off at the last minute. We were then informed that the boarding would commence at 7.30pm. We were loaded onto buses to board the aircraft but had to wait in it for 30 minutes. The flight finally took off at 9.46pm.”

Shah said he had to miss an important event due to the delay, for which he had paid a higher fare.

The perfect storm

According to people aware of the matter, the carrier has been beset by an acute pilot shortage since new FDTL norms were implemented in two phases on July 1 and November 1. The rules, designed to combat fatigue and boost rest periods, mandate increased weekly rest periods to 48 hours, extension of night hours, and limiting the number of night landings to two, down from six earlier.

While the carrier had been managing the tighter crew constraints, people quoted above said the situation cascaded into crisis after the emergency Airbus software patch. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency airworthiness directive affecting approximately 6,000 A320-family aircraft globally after a JetBlue flight experienced an altitude drop on October 30, injuring passengers.

In India, 200 of IndiGo’s 366 operational A320-family aircraft required the urgent software update. Though the airline completed the work and claimed “zero cancellations” at the time, a former airline official said the patch “did not lead to flight cancellations on Saturday but definitely delayed flights, causing expiry of the FDTL”.

The official added that adverse weather around Chennai due to Cyclone Fengal on Sunday prevented the situation from improving. “The urgent safety mandate on A320 aircraft did not lead to flight cancellations on Saturday but definitely delayed flights, causing expiry of the FDTL. Moreover, airspace around Chennai had some impact on Sunday as well, not allowing the situation to get better,” the official said.

The DGCA said on Wednesday it was investigating the situation and had summoned IndiGo to its headquarters “to present the facts leading to the current situation along with plans to mitigate the ongoing delays and cancellations”.

Single-fleet strategy becomes Achilles heel

The crisis has laid bare a critical vulnerability in IndiGo’s core business strategy. The airline has built its success on operating an almost exclusively Airbus A320-family fleet, a single-type approach that delivers cost savings through streamlined pilot training, simplified maintenance, reduced spare parts inventory and enormous bulk-purchase discounts and has been instrumental in helping IndiGo capture more than 60% of India’s domestic market.

But when the Airbus emergency directive required more than half of IndiGo’s operational fleet to be taken in for urgent maintenance, the airline had no alternative aircraft types to deploy, unlike rivals such as Air India which operate diverse fleets including Boeing 737, 777s and 787s.

The single-fleet strategy, long lauded as IndiGo’s competitive advantage, had turned into a single point of failure.

IndiGo, which is known for its punctuality, recorded an on-time performance score of just 35% on Tuesday, according to official data—the lowest of all Indian airlines and a precipitous drop from the airline’s typical 80%-plus performance at major Indian airports. Wednesday’s figure would only be available on Thursday.

The airline, which operates around 2,200-2,300 flights daily to over 90 domestic and 45 international destinations, said its teams were “working around the clock to ease customer discomfort and ensure operations stabilise as quickly as possible”.

IndiGo said affected customers were being offered alternate travel arrangements to reach their destinations or refunds, as applicable. The airline requested customers to check the latest flight status at its website before heading to the airport.

As of December 2, IndiGo had a total of 416 aircraft in its fleet, with 366 in operations and 50 on ground, up from 47 the previous month, according to aircraft fleet tracking website Planespotter.net.

The Airline Pilots Association of India, which represents over 800 pilots, criticised what it called “a failure of proactive resource planning” by dominant airlines. “Despite sufficient time being accorded, most airlines started preparing rather late, failing to properly adjust crew rosters 15 days in advance as required,” the association said in a statement, suggesting the crisis pointed to “an initial managerial underestimation or delay in the strategic planning necessary to provision crew accordingly”.