IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers on Thursday appeared before the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), days after his airline cancelled thousands of flights stranding tens of thousands of passengers at multiple airports across the country due, primarily due to the shortage of crew. Elbers was asked to submit a comprehensive report, including data and updates, on the operational disruptions.

This was on a day when IndiGo cancelled 60 flights at Bengaluru airport. A day earlier, the airline cancelled 220 flights from across three key airports — Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, with Delhi seeing the most cancellations at 137.

He reached the DGCA office around 2:24 pm, and left after a little over two hours at 4:45 pm.

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What IndiGo chairman said

Ten days after the IndiGo fiasco, its Chairman Vikram Mehta on Wednesday apologised for the chaos and attributed the massive disruptions to a combination of internal and external “unanticipated” events. He said the reasons include “minor technical glitches, scheduled changes linked to the start of the Winter season, adverse weather conditions, increased congestion in the aviation system, and implementation of/ and operation under the updated crew rostering rules”.

IndiGo witnessed its pilots’ strength depleting by 378 pilots in the last nine months even after its chief operating officer and Accountable Manager, Isidro Porqueras stated to the DGCA in a letter last December that “the overall impact of implementing the proposed changes above (now-implemented FDTL) norms would amount to an approximate 3 per cent increase in crewing requirements”.

Minister of State for Civil Aviation Murlidhar Mohol on December 8, informed Parliament, that IndiGo had employed 5,085 pilots.

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DGCA takes strict action against IndiGo

The DGCA, earlier, took some stringent actions against the airline when the operational failure was unfolding across the country. The aviation regulator has now decided to station its personnel at IndiGo’s headquarters, as it steps up oversight on India’s largest airline.

The DGCA has formed an oversight team of eight senior captains, and two of them, along with two government officials. They all will be stationed at IndiGo’s Gurgaon headquarters to monitor cancellation status, crew deployment, unplanned leave, and routes hit by staff shortages, reported PTI. These teams have been instructed to submit a daily report to the regulator.

Pilots’ body Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) in the recent past alleged the current disruption at IndiGo was the direct consequence of the airline’s “prolonged and unorthodox lean manpower strategy across departments, particularly in flight operations.”

Despite the two-year preparatory window before full FDTL implementation, the airline “inexplicably adopted a hiring freeze, entered non-poaching arrangements, maintained a pilot pay freeze through cartel-like behaviour, and demonstrated other short-sighted planning practices,” it said, quoted the news agency.