IndiGo Flight Crisis: 150+ Cancellations and Counting as Crew Roster Norms Bite

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IndiGo's operations have been severely disrupted, with over 150 flights cancelled on Wednesday, stranding thousands of passengers across India. The crisis is attributed to the airline's struggles to adapt to stringent new crew rostering rules, which have resulted in operational disruptions snowballing into a full-blown crisis. The airline has apologized for the inconvenience and warned travelers to expect further cancellations through Friday. It has initiated 'calibrated adjustments' to stabilize operations over the next 48 hours. The immediate trigger for the crisis was an emergency Airbus A320 software patch rushed through over the weekend, which disrupted crew scheduling. This came at a time when the airline was already operating with minimal slack due to the new Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) rules. Data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) shows that IndiGo had already been under strain, having canceled 1,232 flights in November, with 755 attributed to FDTL issues. On-time performance dropped to 67.70% from 84.1% in October. The crisis has exposed a critical vulnerability in IndiGo's core business strategy, which relies heavily on operating an almost exclusively Airbus A320-family fleet. When the Airbus emergency directive required more than half of IndiGo's operational fleet to be taken in for urgent maintenance, the airline had no alternative aircraft types to deploy. IndiGo's single-fleet strategy, once seen as a competitive advantage, has turned into a single point of failure. The airline operates around 2,200-2,300 flights daily to over 90 domestic and 45 international destinations. Its teams are working around the clock to ease customer discomfort and ensure operations stabilize as quickly as possible. Affected customers are being offered alternate travel arrangements or refunds, as applicable. The airline requests customers to check the latest flight status at its website before heading to the airport. The Airline Pilots Association of India has criticized the crisis as a 'failure of proactive resource planning' by dominant airlines, suggesting that the crisis points to an initial managerial underestimation or delay in strategic planning necessary to provision crew accordingly.