The Aviation Ministry has ordered a 10% curtailment of IndiGo routes amid continued chaos over flight cancellations. The announcement came even as the beleaguered airline said it had finally reinstated operations across its network and vowed to fly nearly 1900 flights on Wednesday. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation had earlier instructed IndiGo to cut down its flight operations by 5% to ease passenger troubles.
“The Ministry considers it necessary to curtail the overall Indigo routes, which will help in stabilizing the airline’s operations and lead to reduced cancellations. A curtailment of 10% has been ordered. While abiding with it, Indigo will continue to cover all its destinations as before,” announced Union Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu.
He also revealed that officials held a second meeting with the airline management to “review the stabilisation measures”. CEO Pieter Elbers was also summoned to the Ministry for an update and confirmed that 100% of the refunds had been completed for flights till December 6.
“Indigo has been instructed to comply with all the directives of the Ministry, including fare capping and passenger convenience measures without any exception,” Kinjarapu added.
‘Operations reinstated across network’
“IndiGo can confirm that after days of significant and steady improvement across the network, we have reinstated our operations across our network. This means all flights published on our website are scheduled to operate with an adjusted network. Also, nearly all bags that were stuck at airports have been delivered to our customers and the teams are working on delivering the remaining at the earliest,” the airline assured.
IndiGo said that they were operating “more than 1800 flights connecting all 138 stations” on Tuesday — with plans to fly nearly 1900 flights tomorrow.
“We have optimised our operations, and our on-time performance is also back to normal levels. We have also automated the procedure for our customers to get full refunds upon cancellations (with ‘No Questions Asked’) through a simple process on our website,” added an official statement.
