The last few days have been chaotic like never before for IndiGo. This is not the first time that the airline faced pilot shortage. It did in 2019, when it initially blamed the delays and cancellations on a storm impacting its network, later admitting that it has pilot shortage and that it would cut its schedule by 2% for the remainder of the scheduling season. Cut to 2025, a combination of factors led to an unforseen meltdown whi,ch eventually saw the airline suspend operations from major bases for hours to reset its network.
The government and regulator have swung into action subsequently, after being criticsed for not acting in time. It started with capping air fares, asking IndiGo to restart operations, deliver baggage, process refunds and a lot more which was in interest of the passengers, though as a reaction and not as a pro active measure. The next step involved a show cause notice to the CEO and COO of the airline, followed by reducing the number of flights for IndiGo. The morning started with an announcement of 5% reduction and by evening it was 10%. Let us understand this in detail.
The initial circular of DGCA, the regulator, calculates the flighs approved and operated by the airline. These numbers clearly include only domestic flights. While the DGCA also approves flights for International sectors, the trend so far over the years has been to curtail flights on domestic for better management and the ability of other airlines to fill in the gap. For international sector, the paperwork for transfering seats or frequency, that too for a temporary period is cumbersome and time consuming and also impacts the image of the country.
IndiGo has approvals for 15014 weekly flights on domestic routes in India this winter. November was the very first month of the winter schedule and no airline achieves full utilisation in the first month of operations. Lets take a look at it for the last winter season.
IndiGo has been consistently asking for more and more departures with each season. Here is how it looks like.
IndiGo has been consistently asking for more flights and not just obtaining them but also operating them. The increase this time around wasn’t abnormal, except that the FDTL changed and co-incided with the change in schedule.
Since the monthly average can be confusing due to the days of the month, below is a chart showing the average daily departures in respective months.
What exactly is the impact?
At 15014 weekly departures, IndiGo would have 2145 daily flights on an average on domestic routes. A 10% cut indicates a reduction of 214 flights for IndiGo, which means that the approval will be for 1931 departures a day. In November, the airline averaged 1981 departures, while in October it did 1980 domestic departures. The net impact is thus about 50 departures a day. At 5% cut, there was no impact for IndiGo, since it was operating at 92.35% for November, the first full month of operations in Winter schedule. The impact now is 2.35% domestic departures which it was operating to be cut. For records, the airline has said that it is operating over 1800 flights today (December 09) and would operate close to 1900 flights tomorrow (December 10). These also include international flights (Averaged 273 per day in October), which indicates that domestic flights are far from its earlier peak. The calculation indicates that IndiGo’s domestic deployment should be in the range of 1550 – 1650 daily departures at the moment, about 330 daily departures away from the peak it was operating at. The airline did operate more flights in March than now, but that was under the older FDTL regime.
Network Thoughts
The DGCA circular talks about a 10% reduction and asking the airline to submit a revised schedule. The circular also talks about withdrawing from routes which has multiple players, which will make it difficult for IndiGo in terms of managing competition. The challenges right now are different though.
In effect, a total of 50 flights will be lost until the airline can add flights again. This is from what it operated in November and not as of today, when it is still significantly shy of its peak domestic departures. Which would be those 50 flights? Will they be distributed across the country? Will the ministry and regulator intervene in it or will it be the airlines’ prerogative? Rivals will not only vie for passengers, but most importantly for slots especially if it involves Delhi and Mumbai.
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