How IndiGo Played Number Games To Justify Non-Compliance
IndiGo’s mass cancellations and rising backlash suggest its apologies mask an attempt to evade pilot-fatigue norms rather than a simple error.
The Gist
IndiGo's Flight Cancellations Cause Nationwide Disruption
- The revised norms require airlines to hire more pilots to accommodate increased rest periods and reduced night duty.
- The government has given IndiGo until February to comply, risking further disruption in India's aviation market, where it holds a 65% share.
The biggest event in India over the last week has definitely been the chaos in the skies, over IndiGo’s massive flight cancellations. These were caused by IndiGo’s arrogance that, given its market dominance, it would choose how and when to comply with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s new norms on Flight Duty Time Limitation (FTDL) for pilots. These FDTL revisions were notified in January 2024, but its implementation was staggered and postponed to commence in November 2025.
Under the revised norms — calling for reduced pilot workloads that would reduce the risk of stressed pilots causing accidents and endangering passengers — to maintain its existing flight schedule, an airline would have to hire several more pilots. Pilots had been mandated 36 hours of continuous rest in a week, that now stands revised to 48 hours of continuous rest.
Now, a pilot is restricted to just two stretches of consecutive night duty, whereas earlier norms allowed greater flexibility. The night has become a bit longer for pilots as well, stretching from midnight to 6 am, while, earlier, night meant the time from midnight to 5 am. Pilots were earlier permitted to make up to six night landings during a single flight duty period. Now, only two night landings are permitted per flight duty period.
Just the redefinition of the night and the capping of permitted night landings at two per flight duty period necessitate a jump in the number of pilots required. Consider a hypothetical example of a flight that leaves Chandigarh short of midnight, hops to Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, and Bengaluru before terminating in Chennai. Under the earlier norms, a single pilot could operate the aircraft for the duration of the flight. Now, the pilot would need to be relieved at Mumbai, the relief pilot substituted at Bengaluru, with the third pilot flying the plane to Chennai.
A Good Way To Mess Up
The airlines had requested the regulator to replace the arbitrary caps on night landings with proven Fatigue Risk Management Systems, which replace prescriptive limits with caps derived from data and modelling. The regulator chose to stay rooted in the 20th century. Other airlines hired more pilots. IndiGo expanded services and hired more pilots, but nowhere on the scale required to comply with the new norms. It says it messed up.
Nice way to mess up, when you avoid incurring costs on new pilot recruits, even as your rivals in the business add to their costs. The government has given IndiGo time till February to comply with the new norms, meaning two more months of savings and accumulation of reserves vis-à-vis rivals in the business.
IndiGo accounts for 65% of the aviation market. If their flights get disrupted, the nation comes to a standstill. IndiGo was probably banking on this potential when it decided to hide behind elementary innumeracy to justify non-compliance. The government should levy a fine that takes away the entirety of the savings the airline has made on pilot salaries by defying the regulation.
If the airline baulks, the Competition Commission of India should break up the company.
AI Spree, But What About Power?
On a happier note, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have together announced $57 billion of investment in India in the artificial intelligence space. India needs to plan for the additional demand for round-the-clock power that this would create in India.
Right now, India’s power sector is marred by fragmentation of regulation, imbalance between generation types, a yawning gap in place of storage capacity and a fragile grid that has to ask renewable power generators to back down in order to maintain grid stability.
China might be the world leader in producing the major ingredients of the green transition: solar and wind power equipment, electric vehicles and battery storage, but Europe is arguably ahead when it comes to integrating diverse power generation sources and storage capacities with intelligent grids that make extensive use of sophisticated trading and power electronics. India needs to follow China’s lead as well as Europe’s in this area.
That calls for thinking of systems, going beyond individual happenings to their interconnections amongst themselves and larger operating frameworks. The reluctance to think in terms of systems manifests in other ways as well.
Club Fire And Air Pollution
A fire at a nightclub in Goa killed 25 people, including four foreign tourists. Much sound and fury go into tracing and arresting the club’s owners, but little attention is paid to identifying the systemic deficiencies that lead to such accidents.
Air quality in Delhi has been poor, very poor or severe continuously since late October. Other cities have not been spared either. The sales of antihistamines, asthma medicines and other cures for respiratory stress have spiked. Millions of people have their health damaged, and children suffer irreversible stunting of their mental faculties through protracted exposure to high levels of pollution.
Tackling this also calls for systems thinking and action. Which probably means that the problem will remain unaddressed for the foreseeable future. Go ahead and buy stocks of air purifier makers.
In China And The US
The US Fed has reduced its policy rate by yet another 25 basis points. Fed chairman Jerome Powell said the US jobs data probably overstates job creation and that subsequent revisions might reduce job creation by some 20,000 a month. This sombre reflection leads the Fed to cut rates.
It is likely to further erode the dollar. The dollar index is already down 8% since February, signalling that the rupee’s steady weakening against the dollar spells even more pronounced weakening against other major currencies.
China has worked up a trade surplus of $1.1 trillion over the first 11 months of this calendar year. The yuan has appreciated almost 3% against the dollar over the year, but considering the dollar’s own weakening and China’s own stated goal of increasing the internal circulation, meaning domestic economic activity, the Chinese currency should have strengthened much more.
China’s export success, despite a 20% fall in exports to the US, might appear commendable, but it is at the expense of domestic manufacturing in China’s export markets. This is not sustainable, and China would need to let the yuan appreciate to reduce exports and increase imports.
Trump Distracting From Domestic Woes
President Trump has blamed prices that stubbornly refuse to come down on his predecessor and claims to champion affordability. But he is creating a huge distraction from domestic woes for fellow Americans by preparing to start, at least appearing to, a war against Venezuela.
Since September, Americans have been shooting and destroying boats that allegedly carry drugs to the US, killing their passengers. On Thursday, American troops hijacked a Venezuelan oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. This was undertaken after deploying a sizeable chunk of the US Navy around Venezuela.
Trump is still intent on getting that Nobel prize for peace. He persists with his attempts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. Since Ukraine would be hard put to continue the war if the US withdraws satellite intelligence, even if Europe stumps up the cash, the end of the Ukraine war depends on the US. It might well be near.
President Trump has forced people to reckon, once again, with imperialism.
