IndiGo Flight Chaos Enters Day 4, Delhi Airport Among Worst Hit

The largest Airline in India IndiGo remained in the grip of rampant service disruption in the fourth consecutive day on Friday creating a new mess of chaos among the passengers. The officials of the Delhi airport said that a total of 135 IndiGo flights and 90 flights had been cancelled since morning in the IGI airport alone, the national capital of the country, making it the worst hit airports in the country.

Friday saw 52 incoming and 50 outgoing IndiGo flights cancelled at Bengaluru Airport and 92 flights cancelled during the day in Hyderabad, contributing to the misery that was being experienced across the nation in terms of travel.

The mass cancellations and delays - now topping 1,000 cancellations in four days - are due to a domino effect of operational breakdown that started happening in the beginning of this week.

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What began as a series of delays due to an Airbus A320 software advisory, which took a number of flights into the late night schedules, morphed into a full-scale crisis after the more stringent Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) regulations were implemented.

What was the source of this colossal mess in IndiGo?

Although this meltdown occurred later than the week before, prior to this week, IndiGo faced a pilot shortage that led to over 25 flight cancellations per day. The new FDTL regulations - which are intended to decrease fatigue by more frequent rest of crews, and by restricting nighttime flights - have drastically decreased the number of flights that a pilot can fly, particularly in red-eye hours.

As the aircraft continued to land late after midnight thanks to the A320 glitch, it also caused large pools of crew to automatically enter required rest hours - airplanes were automatically grounded and the schedules were just falling through like a row of dominos.

Things were not helped by the winter schedule that saw the flight frequency increased since October 26.

Delays and cancellations all over India

In this week alone, there is over 800 IndiGo flights which were cancelled in the last two days, with over 400 on Thursday and over 150 on Wednesday. Hundreds of passengers were left without their planes, many of them complaining that they were notified of their flights at the last minute and did not have other solutions.

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IndiGo has attributed the crisis to inaccurate assessment and planning that real crew needs are well in excess of its projections when the FDTL regulations were placed on a court order basis.

Requirements of the new FDTL rules

The main limitations that are affecting the network of IndiGo are:

• Compulsory 48 hour weekly rest, increased to 36 hours.
• Each pilot should have no more than two landings a week by night.
• No more than two sequential night shifts.
• Flights crossing the night window Maximum 8 flight hours per day.
• To the greatest extent, the rules have struck hardest IndiGo since it operates a high-frequency, high-utilisation.
• model with numerous early- morning flights and late-night flights.

Operations remain unstable

Inspecting the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has started to reveal cases of poor passenger-handling facilities at the airports as the crowd filled up the terminals.

Although IndiGo is trying to find relief in night-duty rules, it has stated that further flight cancellations will persist in the coming few days as a schedule restart.

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The airline has expressed remorse to the clients stating that teams were in collaboration with the aviation authorities to normalise operations. It has encouraged passengers to confirm flight status by checking it prior to going to the airport.

More turbulence ahead

IndiGo has cautioned that it will take time to stabilise the operations and cancellations may be very high on a daily basis, which is far much higher than normal. There is little that air travellers can do instead of using air, so in India, where Indigo has the highest share of the market, disruption is likely to remain affecting the thousands of people without the airline restoring control of its schedule.

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