By now, you’ve probably seen the memes, the videos and the chaos currently unfolding at Indian airports. It almost feels like an enemy nation hacked our aviation sector overnight. The culprit? IndiGo — our national Uber-with-wings — which controls over 60% of the market and has spectacularly crashed its pilot roster. Thousands of flights have been cancelled daily. The fiasco continues as I write this. Lakhs of passengers are stranded. Weddings, conferences, interviews, holidays — all disrupted. There’s even a viral video of an online shaadi. (Covid taught us too many things.) Visa appointments? Gone. Money? Burnt. Tears? Unlimited. And junior IndiGo ground staff — who had zero part in this — are now the nation’s punching bags. Meanwhile, the rest of the internet is having a meme party.
Funny — unless, of course, you were among the unlucky souls stuck in the airport overnight, scrambling to find stale overpriced samosas for dinner. With 16 crore Indians flying every year — mostly on IndiGo — odds are you know someone who suffered.
To be fair, IndiGo has been the one shining star in India’s graveyard of airlines. Ask the ghosts of Sahara, Kingfisher, and Jet Airways. While they nosedived financially, IndiGo soared — making money in a business where glamour is a mask and bankruptcy lurks behind every business-class curtain.
India is a land where there are only three things people willingly spend on: religion, weddings and their children’s education. Other than that, Indians love to scrape pennies. IndiGo understood that. No ovens on board — they add weight. Instead, you get those legendary cold sandwiches (the chicken junglee has not evolved since dinosaurs roamed the planet). Want fine dining? Sure — dehydrated upma rehydrated with thermos water. Fun.
However, while it’s no Michelin experience, Indigo does the one job it promises to do – take you from point A to point B, in relatively clean flights, and with a focus on on-time performance. It’s therefore ironic that an airline building a brand around on-time performance is knocked out of its entire schedule.
So what triggered this chaos? New DGCA rules — not sudden ones, but announced years ago — that finally came into effect. The audacity: they want pilots to sleep. Properly. Like eight hours of actual rest, not a catnap after three red-eye flights. Fewer night duties, longer breaks, basically: treat pilots like humans, not flight robots.
And that’s bad for business. More rest means more pilots. More pilots mean more cost. More cost means ticket prices that might — god forbid — go up by ₹200. And Indians would save that money to spend on their kids wedding buffet plate one day.
Finally, the rules kicked in and before you knew it, the whole Indigo “on-time” empire dominating Indian skies collapsed like badly built card house in turbulence.
Yes, I know it is super tempting, almost default, to blame the regulator for everything. The Indian government and its babus have such a reputation that if a new rule caused chaos, then it’s obvious that the rulemakers and the rule are the problem. However, as much as babu-bashing is fun, it is important to see the details here. In this case, the DGCA was only aligning India with global standards — FAA in the US, EASA in Europe. Pilot fatigue isn’t a joke — a sleepy pilot is not what you want flying a metal tube at 35,000 feet. Believe it or not, pilots are human beings. And all human beings need to rest. If a pilot is unrested and hence lacks focus while flying, the results can be catastrophic. Hence, milking a pilot as much as possible so that Indians can save more on flights is a dumb idea.
Second, the regulator did not shove the rules in overnight. They gave years for the airline to implement them. It is Indigo that probably felt the regulator would extend implementation again, and therefore didn’t take enough steps. In a sense, Indigo was right. The recent chaos they unleashed on the public has forced the DGCA to give a three-month extension to Indigo. Indigo is no longer just a private company. It is India’s aviation sector. If it doesn’t fly, we don’t have aviation in this country. Is such a dependence healthy for our economy? That’s something we all have to answer. There’s nothing wrong with private companies, who we depend on every day anyway (telecom operators, social media companies etc.). However, private companies can often have different incentives, driven by their investors. Indigo’s incentive is to keep costs low and maintain and grow market share – and for that, guidelines that require them to spend more on pilots are not welcome. They will have an incentive to push back or delay these as much as possible, and it looks like that’s what they did.
In all this, two stakeholders suffer the most – the pilots (who don’t get enough rest) and the customers (who were stranded and harassed at airports). Not to mention the poor junior Indigo ground staff, making ₹20k a month, being yelled at only because they are wearing the blue Indigo uniform – as if they are responsible for the hundreds or thousands of flights that were cancelled.
What are the lessons or way forward here for all stakeholders?
One, Indigo needs to get its act together. Sure, Indians love cheap and you want to be cheap as well. However, pilot rest is non-negotiable. Keep that dehydrated upma or reduce its size to half. Don’t scrimp on fresh, well-rested pilots.
Two, the regulator needs to communicate to the public what happened, lest they become the fall guy, which they always do anyway.
Three, the Indian consumer needs to get their priorities right. Pay for safety. Not only demand, but also pay for good service. Else, it will come back to bite you. And no, don’t have that dehydrated poha – it’s horrible for you.
Finally, to the Indigo staff: sorry guys, for all the uncles and aunties that yelled at you. It wasn’t your fault. We are all pawns in the grinding wheels of capitalism, and sometimes we get crushed in the process.
Take rest, Indigo pilots. And here’s hoping you wake up refreshed and get Indian skies soaring again.