India's air travel woes worsened on Friday after the country's largest airline, IndiGo, cancelled more than 1,000 scheduled flights on Friday after three days of widespread disruption across its network.
The carrier, which has a 60 per cent market share in India and flies more than 2,000 flights a day, has been facing widespread disruption in flights for the past three days owing to a shortage of pilots after it failed to adapt to new crew rostering rules. Thousands of passengers are stranded across India with all IndiGo flights from Delhi cancelled.
The government said it is closely monitoring the situation and expressed "clear displeasure" with how the airline has handled the situation. In a separate statement, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said the disruptions were primarily on account of "misjudgement and planning gaps" in implementing the new flight duty time limitation rules. It directed IndiGo to submit a detailed plan on crew recruitment, training, roster restructuring, safety-risk assessments and other mitigation measures with immediate effect.
It is learnt that IndiGo has been granted a waiver from the new pilot rest rules, and the ban on combining pilot leave with weekly rest has been eased to stabilise operations, but an official confirmation in this regard is awaited.
IndiGo said it would waive off all cancellation and reschedule requests for travel between December 5 and 15. But several passengers have taken to the social media to express their resentment. Singapore's High Commissioner to India Simon Wong said he was "lost for words" as he joined thousands stranded at the airport and missed the wedding of a staff member.
It could take another 10 days: IndiGo CEO
IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers issued his first statement on Friday, acknowledging the operational chaos. He said it could take another 10 days to restore normalcy. However, just a few hours before his statement, the government had assured full restoration of services by Monday.
Elbers confirmed that over 1,000 flights were cancelled on December 5. He said the disruption was caused by the rebooting of IndiGo’s entire operational system.
“I want to share with you that we have experienced severe operational disruptions for the past few days. Since then, the crisis continues to aggravate, with today being the most severely impacted day with the number of cancellations well over a thousand or more than half of our number of daily flights," Elbers said in a video message on Friday, advising passengers to monitor flight updates closely.
“Cancellations were made for Friday as to align IndiGo crew and planes to be where they need to start afresh on Saturday morning,” he said, hoping that with the company working on a war footing, there would be less than 1,000 cancellations on Saturday.
"Earlier measures of the last few days, regrettably, have proven not to be enough, but we’ve decided today for a reboot of all our systems and schedules, resulting in the highest number of cancellations so far, but imperative for progressive improvements starting from Saturday. With these actions, we expect on Saturday to have cancellations below 1,000," he said.
Also Read: Chaos continues at airports as 250 IndiGo flights cancelled
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