Peter Albers – Turning up the heat on IndiGo’s top management, aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Saturday issued show cause notices to the airline’s chief executive officer Pieter Elbers and its accountable manager and chief operating officer Isidre Porqueras over the widespread disruptions in the carrier’s flight operations this week, it is learnt. Both the top officials have been given 24 hours by the regulator to explain why enforcement action should not be taken against them. According to sources in the know, the notices said that the large-scale operational failures at IndiGo indicate significant lapses in planning, oversight, and resource management, and prima facie reflect non-compliance by the airline on some provisions of the Aircraft Rules, 1937 and the new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules.
The notices also stated that IndiGo failed to provide the affected passengers proper information and facilities that are mandatory in the case of flight delays and cancellations. “Whereas, as the CEO, you are responsible for ensuring effective management of the airlines but you have failed in your duty to ensure timely arrangements for conduct of reliable operations and the availability of requisite facilities to the passengers,” the DGCA’s notice to Elbers is learnt to have said.
According to sources, strict action could be in the offing for India’s largest airline and its top executives in view of the disruption due to which scores of flights have been cancelled on a daily basis this week, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports across India. The action is expected to be taken on the basis of the report of the four-member inquiry committee that was set up by the DGCA on Friday.
The panel has two weeks to submit its report. Top officials of the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) held a meeting today with Elbers today, and the IndiGo CEO was asked to review the ongoing disruption and address the problem on an immediate basis. The meeting was attended by Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu, Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha, and DGCA Director General Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, along with other senior officials.
According to sources, any action against the airline and its officials is likely to be taken after operations stabilise and the inquiry panel submits its report. Elbers, who has 30 years of aviation business experience under his belt, has been at the helm of IndiGo since September 2022, just as the airline came out of the pandemic.
Prior to joining IndiGo, he was the President & Chief Executive Officer of Dutch carrier KLM for eight years. His tenure so far at IndiGo has seen the airline expand its network far and wide beyond India, a strategy he likes to call “internationalisation”. Elbers has also been instrumental in the IndiGo’s evolution from a typical low-cost carrier into a “fit-for-purpose” airline, which now offers a business class product on its top routes, and has even entered the wide-body long-haul segment with flights to various European cities.
IndiGo is now counted among the world’s top airlines by passenger volumes, and has in recent years tightened its stranglehold over India’s domestic aviation market with a dense and high-frequency network. The period has also seen the airline placing world record-breaking aircraft orders.
Story continues below this ad The massive disruption at IndiGo—India’s largest airline that commands over 60 per cent of the domestic market share—has thrown commercial flight operations out of gear all over the country. With scores of IndiGo flights cancelled daily this week—over 1,000 cancellations or over half its scheduled flights on Friday and over 800 flights on Saturday—thousands of passengers were stranded, and scenes of chaos erupted at major airports across India.
The DGCA on Friday granted IndiGo a temporary one-time exemption from some night operations-related changes in the new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) norms for its Airbus A320 pilots. The temporary rollback, which will be in place till February 10, is likely to help IndiGo—caught grossly unprepared for the new crew rest norms—to get its act together and stabilise operations from heron.
The DGCA has also granted a few other temporary relaxations to IndiGo. The airline now expects the situation to normalise by December 10-15. The primary reason for this disruption is crew shortages in the wake of the new FDTL rules, which IndiGo did not plan for properly.
As per the DGCA, IndiGo informed it that the disruptions “have arisen primarily from misjudgement and planning gaps in implementing” the second phase of new FDTL rules, with the airline accepting that the actual crew requirement for the new rules exceeded what it had anticipated. According to data presented to the DGCA by IndiGo, with the new FDTL rules, it requires 2,422 captains and 2,153 first officers to operate its Airbus A320 fleet to maintain stable operations. But it currently has 2,357 captains and 2,194 first officers operating the A320 aircraft.
Although the new FDTL rules apply to all domestic airlines, IndiGo has been the most severely-affected carrier. The factors that have made IndiGo more vulnerable, according to industry sources, include its massive scale of operations, a high-frequency network, significant number of night and wee hour flights, and high aircraft and crew utilisation levels, leaving little elbow room for the airline to manage crew shortages. With its fleet of over 400 aircraft, IndiGo operates over 2,300 flights a day.
By contrast, the next biggest airline group—Air India—operates less than half the number of flights IndiGo operates.