India’s largest airline, which proudly carries nearly two out of every three domestic passengers, has hit an air pocket nobody saw coming. Government data shows only 35% of its 2,200+ daily flights departed on time on Tuesday (December 2 December). By Wednesday afternoon, close to 200 IndiGo flights had already been scrapped across Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, with delays stretching up to seven or eight hours on some routes.
The villain? A severe shortage of pilots and cabin crew triggered by the new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules that kicked in last month. Designed to give crew more rest and make flying safer in the long run, the revised rostering has left IndiGo scrambling to find enough qualified people to actually fly the planes.
“Some flights got cancelled simply because there was no cabin crew available,” a senior official at one of India’s busiest airports told me on condition of anonymity. “They’re flying crew in from other cities on deadhead flights just to operate a single sector. It’s that bad.”
IndiGo’s legendary on-time performance, once the envy of every rival, has nosedived below even SpiceJet and Alliance Air, airlines that rarely make it to the top of punctuality charts.
Passengers are bearing the brunt. Social media is flooded with pictures of overcrowded terminals, families camped on the floor at Delhi’s T1, and baggage belts at a standstill because IndiGo’s baggage messaging system decided to take the day off too.
In a statement, an IndiGo spokesperson said:
“We have had several unavoidable delays and a few cancellations in the past few days due to crew availability, low visibility, airport congestion and some technology glitches. Our teams are working round the clock to stabilise operations. Affected customers are being offered re-accommodation or full refunds.”
Translation: things are messy, and they know it.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. December is peak domestic travel season, weddings, year-end vacations, kids’ holidays, the works. Roughly half a million Indians fly within the country every single day right now, and IndiGo normally handles well over 300,000 of them. When 65% of your flights run late, the ripple effect lasts for days.
For now, the airline is begging passengers to keep checking flight status online before leaving home and promising to get crew numbers back up “as quickly as possible.”
Until then, if you have an IndiGo ticket in the next few days, pack extra patience. You’re going to need it.
