Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: IndiGo could temporarily reduce some more flights post Feb 10 when it has to implement the new safety-enhancing & humane flight duty time limitation (FDTL) rules. The airline on Monday assured the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) it will ensure there are no disruptions next month under the new rules that increase pilot requirement and for that, it may opt for a short term network readjustment if needed.The airline’s schedule was cut 10% last month after the December fiasco and it currently operates about 2,200 daily scheduled domestic and international flights. Of these 2,200 flights, about 350 are mounted on its turboprop ATR fleet and the rest on Airbus A320/A321s.
To minimise fresh cuts from February 10, when the exemption from the new FDTL for its mainstay Airbus A320 family fleet pilots ends, IndiGo will shift some medium to short routes currently served by A320s to ATR.This will slightly reduce the number of flights on A320s and enable the airline to achieve two things — minimise further cuts on the Airbus fleet and operate the slightly more truncated schedule without any hiccups. Both the aviation ministry and DGCA are closely monitoring the process as they, along with IndiGo, are absolutely certain on one thing that a repeat of the chaos witnessed last month can’t be allowed again, let alone as soon as next month.To ensure that, the DGCA has been taking constant updates from IndiGo, including the latest one on Monday. ,The regulator is going to cross-check the data submitted by the airline and match it against its proposed post February 10 operations to see that there are no slippages.“If any cuts are needed, the same will be decided well in time to ensure there are no last-minute cancellations, leaving flyers stranded at airports. Affected passengers of flights that may need to be cut after February 10 will need to be informed in time and given the option of a refund or alternate flights. We will not allow any public inconvenience,” said people in the know.IndiGo clearly has to set its house in order, and mend fences with pilots as apart from several other factors, a broken relationship between the aviators and top management had aggravated last month’s crisis. Relatively minor pinpricks like withdrawing night allowance on top of major ones including an inhumane rostering (its Nov 2025 is cited as an example of what a roster should not be); tight schedules with no slack; “arrogance” of some key people & the airline’s record profits being shared only with a handful of top brass & not the regular Joes drove a wedge between pilots and those in C Suites. Pilots are closely watching the action, if any, the airline takes against the “bad apples” identified in its internal and the DGCA probe.Post IndiGo’s schedule collapse last month, the regulator had on Dec 5 given IndiGo a temporary exemption from implementing the new flight duty time limitation (FDTL) rules for its A320 family fleet till February 10, 2026. The DGCA had fined IndiGo Rs 22.2 crore, of which Rs 30 lakh is a daily fine for the 68 days of FDTL exemption between December 5 and February 10 that works out to Rs 20.4 crore. Additionally, the airline has to submit a bank guarantee of Rs 50 crore. Of this release of Rs 15 crore is linked to “initial and sustained compliance over six months of the new FDTL through “manpower planning, rostering and fatigue-risk management.”
