IndiGo fiasco: Who is accountable and why refund is not enough for passengers |
IndiGo’s meltdown this week is not a “technical glitch”. It is the visible symptom of a system that chose growth and margins over resilience, and then pushed the cost of that choice onto passengers.
What exactly happened?
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From the start of December, IndiGo began cancelling and delaying flights across its network. On a single day, over 1,000 flights were cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports in the middle of the peak travel season.
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This wasn’t weather. It wasn’t ATC. It was a basic failure: not having enough rested, legal-to-fly pilots once the new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules actually bit.
With IndiGo controlling over 60% of India’s domestic market, its collapse instantly became a national problem, with fare spikes on other airlines, packed trains, and families missing weddings, exams and medical appointments. The government eventually capped fares on key routes and even spoke of adding trains to rescue stranded passengers – a surreal situation caused by the mis-planning of a private airline.
How rosters are supposed to work
Airline crew scheduling is a continuous, data-heavy process. In simple terms:
• Base roster: Planners build monthly/weekly rosters using published schedules, factoring in legal limits on duty hours, night duties, and minimum rest.
• Standby buffers: A percentage of pilots are kept on reserve or standby each day – their only job is to be available if someone goes sick, a flight runs late, an aircraft goes tech, or weather causes knock-on delays.
• Fatigue & legality checks: Modern crew-management software continuously checks every assigned duty against FDTL rules and internal policies. If a rostered duty would break a rule, the system flags it long before the day of operation.
• Recovery planning: Network control and crew control teams work 24×7, constantly re-optimising the plan – swapping crews, using standbys, and, if needed, trimming schedules in advance to avoid meltdown on the day.
In other words: this kind of crisis does not happen overnight. Your software will scream at you weeks in advance that you do not have enough pilots to operate the published schedule under tougher fatigue rules. Ignoring those warnings and continuing to sell tickets is not “bad luck”; it is a strategic decision.
The FDTL timeline IndiGo cannot pretend it didn’t see
The regulator did not drop these rules out of the blue:
• 8 January 2024 – DGCA issues revised Civil Aviation Requirements (CAR) on FDTL and fatigue risk management, explicitly to “address pilot........