Anyone regularly flying domestic airlines in India knows that they have limited flight operator choices: either Air India or IndiGo, with the latter being more probable as it controls a whopping 65 percent of the aviation sector. So, it is not surprising that when IndiGo cancelled more than 1,500 flights between December 3 and 5, chaos unspooled across airports in the country. 1,000 flights were cancelled on December 5 alone. The cancellations continued through the next week. IndiGo operates 2,200 flights every day.
The scenes that played out at airports were nothing short of a nightmare, with stranded passengers including senior citizens and crying infants. Viral videos of passengers squatting on the tarmac waiting for flights to take off, arguments breaking out between angry passengers and IndiGo’s ground staff, flooded social media and news channels. Passengers were rerouted through multiple flights that were again canceled.
December is peak travel season in India. It is the prime wedding season, and children have holidays from school. Winter also sees flights and trains running late because of fog-induced delays. IndiGo’s mass cancellation of flights resulted in schedules for weddings, funerals, exams and other appointments going awry.
Not only IndiGo but also the Ministry for Civil Aviation was in the dock and answerable to an angry public.
What led to the spate of cancellations was not a sudden event, but a long-planned implementation of Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules mandated by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the country’s aviation safety regulator.
According to the revised FDTL rules, pilots are to be rested 48 hours per week, instead of the earlier 36 hours. Moreover, night landings have been limited to two from six earlier. The revised FDTL norms were notified in January 2024 and had to be strictly implemented following High Court order of April 2025. While these norms are in keeping with international standards, implementing them in 2025 in a two-phase manner in July and November became challenging for airlines like IndiGo, which had not prepared for it.
For the past 19 years, IndiGo has branded itself as a no-frills low-cost airline. InterGlobe Aviation, the company that operates IndiGo, has run its operations on a tight leash, cutting down on hiring and instead maximizing the output from its existing staff. So, when it had to comply with the revised rules, it just did not have enough pilots on the roster who were sufficiently rested.
Pieter Elbers, the CEO of IndiGo, put out a video message on social media personally apologizing to customers and promising “no questions asked” refunds. It also put out full-page ads in major newspapers with ‘We are Sorry’ emblazoned across it.
In a bid to restore a measure of normalcy, the DGCA has put in abeyance temporarily its directive regarding crew- duty orders until February 2026. The Airlines Pilots Association of India has strongly objected to this as it undermined and “gravely compromised the safety of the flying public.”
With Parliament in session, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi raised the issue in the house. He also took to X (formerly Twitter) to highlight the dangers of monopoly business practice. “IndiGo fiasco is the cost of this Govt’s monopoly model. Once again, it’s ordinary Indians who pay the price — in delays, cancellations and helplessness,” Gandhi stated,
IndiGo’s disruption had a domino effect — airfares skyrocketed. A one-way ticket fare from Mumbai to Delhi, which is normally $66, shot up to $562.
In a rare display of assertiveness, Union Minister for Civil Aviation K Ram Mohan Naidu took IndiGo to task. Its CEO was summoned. Naidu told Parliament that “strict action” was being taken and IndiGo was “being held accountable.” The ministry has announced that IndiGo’s winter schedule would be slashed by 10 percent and allotted to smaller airlines.
Aviation sector expert and founder of the country’s first low-cost airline, the now-defunct Air Deccan, Captain Gopinath squarely blamed IndiGo for the chaos. In an article in The Economic Times, he wrote that the airline’s aggressive expansion, including the launching of new international routes, “distracted its management from looking into the ‘boring’ nitty-gritty (pilot rest norms).”
“Fewer pilots flying more hours make cash counters jingle,” Gopinath said, pointing out that while other players like Air India, Spice Jet and Akasa Air diligently went about increasing pilot capacity in the past 20 months, IndiGo tried to lobby with the authorities not to enforce the new rules, banking on its clout as an “aviation behemoth.”
Within days of the chaos unfolding, Captain CS Randhawa, president of the Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP), publicly accused IndiGo’s senior management of intentionally “preplanning” the crisis. He demanded they be criminally prosecuted for allegedly pressuring the government to roll back the newly introduced FDTL norms. The FIP alleged that instead of attempting to increase recruitment, IndiGo had imposed a hiring freeze.
IndiGo’s public image has taken a hit. Its stock market worth has plunged as well. In an attempt at damage control, it announced refunds to aggrieved passengers and coupons worth $110 for those most severely affected between December 3 and 5.
Around 1.25 million passengers were reportedly impacted by the IndiGo crisis. According to an IndiGo statement, the company will have to fork out $6 million toward refunds for all cancelled and rescheduled flights.
The IndiGo crisis is a reminder of the larger crisis confronting the sector — airlines have been bleeding losses for some time. Over the past few years, several airlines, including Jet Airways and Kingfisher, shut down.
Capitalizing on this situation, IndiGo grew and now flies to 140 destinations, which include 96 domestic and 44 international destinations.
Although IndiGo is a low-cost airline, its brand reputation was built on operational efficiency. Its flights lived up to its tagline of being “On Time”—it was its punctuality that was the main reason for passengers, even non-budget ones, flying IndiGo.
But the December debacle has resulted in a massive loss of customer goodwill. IndiGo memes went viral with pictures of airports looking like railway stations and tarmacs like bus stops.
As several aviation sector and political observers have noted, since 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, it has gradually and incrementally encouraged monopolies in every sector of the economy, be it telecom, aviation, or airports, in a brazen display of crony capitalism, even if it entailed dismantling public sector enterprises, MTNL and BSNL, in the telecom sector.
This manifested in the aviation sector with a single entity — IndiGo — which controlled the lion’s share of the aviation sector, flexing its muscles to protect its interests.
With the government encouraging and turning a blind eye to business practices that maximize expansion of the aviation sector, while making passenger safety a quick casualty, a crisis was waiting to happen.
Image credit: Shutterstock ID 2415848383. This article was originally published in The Diplomat.
Kavita Chowdhury
Kavita Chowdhury is an independent journalist and writes on development, politics, gender, culture.