DGCA to station staff at IndiGo HQ amid flight cancellations

DGCA has deployed personnel at IndiGo's Gurgaon HQ amid widespread flight cancellations affecting thousands of passengers. The regulator will monitor crew deployment, cancellations, refunds, and operations, while summoning CEO Pieter Elbers for a detailed report on disruptions and restoration plans

New Delhi/Mumbai: Aviation watchdog DGCA will station its personnel at IndiGo’s headquarters as it steps up oversight on India’s largest airline, which continues to cancel dozens of flights despite saying operations have stabilised.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has formed an oversight team of eight senior captains, and two of them, along with two government officials, will be stationed at IndiGo’s Gurgaon headquarters to monitor cancellation status, crew deployment, unplanned leave, and routes hit by staff shortages.

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“Both these teams will submit a daily report,” the DGCA said in the two-page order. DGCA also summoned IndiGo Chief Executive Pieter Elbers to appear at its office on Thursday and submit a complete report, along with comprehensive data and updates, relating to the recent operational disruptions, according to a statement.

Senior officials from the DGCA will carry out immediate on-site inspections to assess IndiGo’s operations across 11 domestic airports, according to an official order on Wednesday.

All assigned officers will visit their respective airports in the next 2-3 days and submit a comprehensive report to the Director of Operations for the flight safety department at the DGCA in New Delhi within 24 hours of their visit, the order said.

Since last week, IndiGo has cancelled thousands of flights nationwide after failing to plan for tighter safety regulations. The cancellations peaked on December 5 and have declined since. The airline on Tuesday said its operations have stabilised and are back to normal levels.

But the cancellations continued with nearly 220 flights at three major airports, including Delhi and Mumbai, being cancelled. As part of the winter schedule for 2025-26, the airline has been operating over 2,200 flights per day.

The latest order is part of a suite of actions by authorities that followed IndiGo, which controls over 65 per cent of the market share, cancelling more than 4,000 flights since December 2 that left tens of thousands of passengers stranded, upending their vacation plans, important meetings, and weddings.

Separately, the Delhi High Court on Wednesday questioned the central government for not taking timely action to check the crisis, asking why the situation was allowed to precipitate.

“The question is why, at all, this crisis arose and what have you been doing?” a bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said and directed the government and the airline to take steps to adequately compensate the affected persons.

The bench directed that by January 22, the next date of hearing, if the inquiry initiated by a committee into the disruption in flight operations over the past week is complete, its report should be submitted to the court in a sealed cover.

DGCA, which previously issued a show cause notice to IndiGo’s CEO and chief operating officer to explain the disruptions, has set up a four-member panel to probe the lapses.

Civil Aviation Minister Rammohan Naidu has ordered a 10 per cent cut in planned flights of the airline to help match the schedule with the pilots available. The personnel deployed at IndiGo’s corporate office will monitor “cancellation status – domestic and international, refund status, on time performance, compensation to passengers and baggage return”, the DGCA order said.

The two captains deployed at IndiGo’s corporate office will daily look into the airline’s total fleet, average stage length, total number of pilots, network details, crew utilisation in hours, all unplanned leaves per day (like sick leave, casual leave and emergency leave), flights per day and available crew, total number of sectors affected on account of crew shortage and standby crew per day per base (cockpit and cabin).
DGCA said it has been decided to constitute an oversight team “in view of passenger inconvenience caused due to large-scale disruptions in the operations of IndiGo Airlines at various airports across the country”. For decades, IndiGo relied on aggressive scheduling and max night-flight utilisation — a business model that collapsed when tighter safety regulations that increased the mandatory weekly rest period for pilots and sharply reduced permissible night-landings and any extended night-duty hours came into force.
The result was catastrophic: on-time performance plunged, hundreds of flights were cancelled daily, and major airports saw chaos with stranded passengers, overloaded terminals, and long queues.
Meanwhile, DGCA has directed Pieter Elbers to appear at its office on Thursday and submit a complete report, along with comprehensive data and updates, relating to the recent operational disruptions.
As per the regulator’s order, the airline has been asked to present information on the flight restoration, recruitment plan of pilots and crew, with updated position of pilot and cabin crew strength, number of flights cancelled and refunds processed, among others.