Hold IndiGo to account, DGCA shouldn’t buckle

The world’s third-largest domestic aviation market has been in disarray the last few days — hundreds of flights cancelled daily, thousands of passengers stranded, and complete chaos at airports across the country. The costs are being incurred by people in not just the cancelled flights — some are being rebooked at significantly higher fares — but also in cancelled hotel bookings, lost hours and unattended events. The blame for the disruption lies at the doors of the airline company and the regulator.

The country’s largest airline, IndiGo, cannot get away by simply saying that disruptions “have arisen primarily from misjudgement and planning gaps”. The new Flight and Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) regulations have been implemented in two phases — from July 1 and November 1. Surely, an airline that runs a high-frequency network with a significant number of night and red eye (early morning) flights should have anticipated the challenges in the wake of the new rules. In fact, the data reportedly presented by the company to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) underscores the gap between airline crew supply and demand — under the new rules, Indigo requires 2,422 captains and 2,153 first officers to maintain stable operations, but it has 2,357 captains and 2,194 first officers. A shortfall in personnel does not just impact a single flight but reverberates through the highly dense airline network. Indigo wasn’t oblivious to such information. The episode also casts an unflattering light on the regulator. DGCA seems to have buckled under pressure. The new FDTL rules aim to address pilot fatigue — a critical operational risk. But the regulator’s decision to grant limited, temporary relaxations on the regulations raises troubling questions. Safety should have been the DGCA’s top priority.

The episode has also exposed the fragility of systems dependent on a few large players. India’s airline sector is a duopoly — Indigo has a market share of more than 60 per cent, while Air India holds around 27 per cent. In such a market, supply could not be immediately increased to meet demand. As prices soared, the government intervened in typical manner by imposing price caps. Such market concentration is a worrying trend in some other sectors of the economy as well. A country soon to be the world’s third-largest economy needs several more big players in crucial sectors. Entry barriers need to be reduced and competition should be encouraged.