Govt asks crisis-hit IndiGo to cut 10% domestic flights until March

Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu on Tuesday summoned crisis-hit IndiGo’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Pieter Elbers and asked him to reduce domestic flights by 10 per cent (over 200 aircraft daily) for the entire winter season to help stabilise operations. This curtailment is double what the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had ordered on Monday.

 

The cancellations will apply to high-frequency domestic routes and not to the roughly 600 routes where IndiGo is the sole operator. In October, the DGCA had approved IndiGo’s winter schedule of 2,145 flights per day. The reduction in IndiGo’s flight schedule is unlikely to be fully absorbed by other airlines, such as Air India, Akasa Air and SpiceJet, except on high-demand routes from major metros like Delhi and Mumbai. But with the peak holiday and wedding-travel season under way, fares on these routes could firm up, said executives of rival airlines.

 

IndiGo said it operated 1,800 flights on Tuesday to all its 138 destinations and plans to operate 1,900 on Wednesday. IndiGo had been operating about 2,300 daily flights — roughly 2,000 domestic and 300 international — until the beginning of December, when it plunged into an operational meltdown after failing to manage its pilot duty rosters under the new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules that came into effect last month.  

 

Naidu said on X that he had “summoned” the IndiGo CEO for an update. “The ministry considers it necessary to curtail the overall Indigo routes, which will help in stabilising the airline’s operations and lead to reduced cancellations. A curtailment of 10 per cent has been ordered. While abiding with it, Indigo will continue to cover all its destinations as before,” he stated.

 

In Indian aviation, the year is divided into two seasons: summer (late March to late October) and winter (late October to late March). Every Indian carrier must get each season’s schedule approved by the DGCA for airport slot allocation.

 

This means IndiGo has been directed to remove about 215 daily flights from its winter schedule, bringing its operations down to roughly 1,930 daily flights until late March.

 

About his meeting with Elbers, Naidu said: “He confirmed that 100 per cent of the refunds for flights affected till December 6 have been completed. A strict instruction to expedite the completion of the remaining refunds and baggage handover was given.”

 

During the last week, he said, many passengers faced severe inconvenience due to IndiGo’s “internal mismanagement” of crew rosters, flight schedules, and “inadequate” communication. While the inquiry and necessary actions are “underway”, another meeting with IndiGo’s “top management” was held to review the “stabilisation measures", he stated.

 

The airline, Naidu said, has been instructed to comply with all the directives of the ministry, including fare capping and passenger convenience measures, without any exception.

 

In its formal order on Tuesday, the DGCA stated: “The airline has not demonstrated an ability to operate these (winter) schedules efficiently. Therefore, it is directed to reduce the schedule by 10 per cent across sectors, especially on high-demand high-frequency flights, and to avoid single-flight operations on a sector by IndiGo.”

 

The regulator asked the airline to submit its revised winter schedule by 5 pm on Wednesday.

 

In a video message to customers, Elbers said: “Earlier, we had indicated that we would normalise our operations between December 10 and 15. I can confirm now that today, as of December 9, our operations are fully stabilised, which means flights reflecting on our website are scheduled to operate with an adjusted network."

 

“We continue to work with the government. Now, as the immediate crisis has been dealt with, we have started to focus internally on what has led to this, lessons learned to be drawn, and how to emerge stronger from this,” Elbers added.

 

The airline, in a separate statement, said it has “optimised its operations” — means cut flights in winter schedule — and its on-time performance (OTP) is also back to "normal" levels.

 

“IndiGo can confirm that after days of significant and steady improvement across the network, we have reinstated our operations across our network. This means all flights published on our website are scheduled to operate with an adjusted network. Also, nearly all bags that were stuck at airports have been delivered to our customers and the teams are working on delivering the remaining at the earliest," it added.

 

The current cut in IndiGo’s flight schedule is unlikely to help rivals as other carriers don’t have excess aircraft, and new deliveries have slowed because of supply chain issues at Airbus and Boeing. “If airport slots on lucrative metro-to-metro routes are vacated, then we would shift our flights from less profitable routes to those ones,” said an executive of an IndiGo’s rival airline.

 

So far, Air India and Akasa Air have avoided increasing capacity through wet-lease or dry-lease arrangements. They just want their ordered planes in their fleet. SpiceJet, however, has added multiple wet-leased planes in its fleet, which means it would have the bandwidth to immediately start flights on heavy demand routes that IndiGo will vacate.

 

A wet lease is when a lessor provides an aircraft with crew and full operational support, while a dry lease is when the lessor provides only the aircraft and the airline handles everything else.

 

Another executive of a rival airline said airfares on routes, where IndiGo vacates its slots, could go up as it is peak demand season due to holiday and wedding-related travel. Moreover, flight operations in the winter season generally get impacted due to fog in northern India.

 

Meanwhile, International Air Transport Association Director General Willie Walsh on Tuesday told PTI that new flight duty norms seem to have led to the operational challenges at IndiGo. He, however, said the airline appears to be making progress in getting back to full operations, and that flight duty norms seem to have led to the operational challenges at the airline.

 

The DGCA’s revised FDTL rules entered their second and final phase on November 1, activating seven clauses deferred during the July rollout. Phase-II tightened limits on how long pilots can fly or remain on duty during the early-morning “window of circadian low” (roughly 0200–0600 hrs), when fatigue risk is highest. For example, Para 3.11 defines “night duty” as any duty period overlapping 0000–0600 hrs in the pilot’s acclimatised time zone, and Para 6.1.4 caps flight time during such duty to 8 hours, total duty time to 10 hours (including pre- and post-flight tasks), and typically allows no more than two landings during these periods.