By Suman Billa
The widespread flight disruptions involving IndiGo this week left thousands of passengers stranded across the country. For many, the consequences were immediate and personal like missed meetings, hurried rebookings, cancelled holidays, and the anxious uncertainty that accompanies long hours in terminals. But beyond the individual stories lies a larger systemic lesson. In an aviation ecosystem where a single airline carries a majority of domestic passengers, localised disruptions can snowball into nationwide turbulence.
This was, undeniably, a bad week for flyers. But it is also a valuable moment for reform—not through blame but through a clear-eyed look at how India’s aviation system must evolve as it enters a phase of unprecedented scale.
Infrastructure races ahead of systems
India’s aviation sector has grown extraordinarily in the past decade. New terminals, new airports, and expanded regional connectivity have transformed access and mobility. Yet the systems underlying this growth—from crew availability and training pipelines to digital coordination and disruption management—are still catching up.
Aviation today functions as critical national infrastructure. It moves business travellers, tourists, students, and migrant workers. It powers India’s domestic tourism engine, meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions/events (MICE) sector, wedding market, and so on. When aviation is reliable, economic activity flourishes. When it stumbles, the effects ripple across sectors far beyond the airline concerned.
This recognition calls for aviation to be engineered like a power grid or digital network with redundancy, shock absorbers, and clear fallback mechanisms. Mature markets ought to do this by mandating standby crew ratios, defining mutual-aid protocols across airlines during large disruptions, and stress-testing systems for seasonal bottlenecks. India is now at the stage where these resilience elements must become structural features, not afterthoughts.
Post-pandemic recovery has brought back passengers at a faster pace than the one at which crew pipelines could rebuild. Globally, pilot and cabin crew shortages are now the biggest operational pressure point. Retirement backlogs, rising fleet sizes, and a competitive hiring environment mean that many airlines globally operate with thinner buffers than ideal.
This week’s events highlight the need to rethink how India approaches crew rostering, fatigue management, and standby capacity. Modern fatigue-risk management systems, transparent reporting standards, and predictive rostering software can help airlines anticipate rather than react to spikes. Regulators around the world are increasingly focusing on these areas and India can set benchmarks that others follow.
Fog in the north, heatwaves that affect aircraft performance, and increasingly unpredictable monsoon patterns are reshaping aviation risk. Cyclones on the east and west coasts frequently disrupt schedules and these patterns are likely to intensify over time.
This new climate reality requires more CAT III-compliant airports for winter operations, improved air traffic flow management to prevent cascading congestion, seasonal flight planning calibrated to fog periods, heat advisories, and monsoon transitions and stronger route redundancy so that a single weather disruption does not cripple the network. As climate-linked disturbances rise, the system must be built for anticipatory resilience rather than reactive firefighting.
India’s tourism ambitions, both domestic and international, depend fundamentally on predictable air travel. A flight cancellation is not just an operational statistic; it is a lost hotel night, a disrupted itinerary, a cancelled conference, and reputational setback for a destination.
The tourism sector, which is investing heavily in tourism circuits, events, and global promotion campaigns, needs an aviation ecosystem that can keep pace. Reliability is therefore not just a transport concern; it is an economic growth requirement.
Despite significant strides such as DigiYatra, disruption management in India still depends on fragmented airline-specific systems. Passengers receive delayed or partial information, rebooking is often manual, and inter-airline cooperation is limited.
Digital stack for aviation
India now has the technological capability proven through United Payments Interface, FASTag, and Open Network for Digital Commerce to build an Aviation Digital Stack, integrating real-time flight and crew status, weather alerts and air traffic control restrictions, automated rebooking options across airlines, standardised compensation and communication protocols, and system-wide data for regulators to detect stress points early.
Such a platform would dramatically reduce chaos during disruptions and provide a single, transparent interface for passengers, airlines, airports, and regulators.
India’s aviation story is one of ambition and expansion, supported by substantial infrastructure investment and a strong policy push. This week’s disruptions should not be seen as a setback to that trajectory. Instead, they should serve as an early signal that the next phase of growth must be accompanied by a commensurate investment in resilience.
A constructive reform agenda could include a National Aviation Resilience Plan aligning airline fleet growth, crew pipelines, and airport expansion, global-standard norms for fatigue management and standby crew buffers, cross-airline rescue, and re-accommodation protocols for large-scale disruptions, a refreshed Passenger Rights Charter centred on automatic, predictable compensation, state level tourism and aviation coordination mechanisms, and a unified Aviation Digital Stack enabling real-time transparency.
India has built world-class airports. The next leap is to build a world-class aviation system, one capable of absorbing shocks without derailing the travel plans of millions.
It has been a difficult week for flyers. But if the lessons are acted upon with foresight, this moment could strengthen the foundations of Indian aviation for the decade ahead.
The author is an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism.
Views are personal