In his first public statement since widespread operational disruptions hit IndiGo last week, the chairman of the airline’s board Vikram Singh Mehta rejected allegations that the crisis was engineered and that the airline tried to influence the government over the revised Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules. Mehta also said that claims that the airline’s board was not engaged on the FDTL issue are “not correct”. The IndiGo chairman announced that the airline’s board will involve an external technical expert to work with the management and help determine the root causes and ensure corrective action, “so that this level of disruption never occurs again”.
Apologising for the disruption that impacted tens of thousands of passengers, Mehta said that while he had been urged to make a statement on the issue, he chose to wait because the airline’s board felt that its first duty was to support IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers and his team, restore operations, and help passengers who were affected. With the airline’s operations now stabilised, Mehta said that he felt it was the right time for him to speak.
“The disruptions of last week did not happen because of any deliberate action. They happened because a combination of internal and unanticipated external events including minor technical glitches, scheduled changes linked to the start of the winter season, adverse weather conditions, increased congestion in the aviation system, and implementation of and operation under the updated crew rostering rules. This is not an excuse. This is simply the truth. Clearly this combination of events pushed our systems beyond their limits,” Mehta said in a video message released by IndiGo on Wednesday evening.
According to Mehta, IndiGo has followed the FDTL rules as they came into effect and did not attempt to bypass them. The new FDTL rules stipulate more rest for pilots and rationalisation of their flying duties—particularly late night operations—in a bid to better manage pilot fatigue, which is a key risk to aviation safety. These new norms, which were stipulated in January last year were delayed in their implementation, and took effect in two phase—from July 1 and November 1—with the second phase rollout hitting IndiGo considerably. The new norms meant that airlines either had to have more pilots to maintain their schedule, or curtail their schedules in line with the new requirements.
On questions raised on the airline’s board, Mehta said, “There has also been a claim that the board was not engaged. This is not correct. The board has been closely involved with this matter for many months. Both the board and the (board’s) risk management committee have received relevant information from the management on the implementation of the rules.”
Some aviation sector experts and former bureaucrats had questioned the effectiveness of the airline’s high-profile board and whether it did enough in the months leading up to a massive operational crisis that brought the country’s aviation system to its knees. While Mehta mentioned that the board was involved and had received the necessary information about the new crew rest rules from the airline’s management, he did not say whether the board was aware that IndiGo was underprepared for the new rules and whether it made any intervention in the run-up to the rollout of the second phase of the FDTL norms from November 1.
Mehta is the Chairman and Non-Executive Independent Director of IndiGo, and was the Chairman of the Shell Group of Companies in India between 1994 and 2012. Other members of the airline board include the airline’s co-founder, promoter and Managing Director Rahul Bhatia in an executive role, India’s former G20 Sherpa and retired IAS officer Amitabh Kant as a non-executive non-independent director, former SEBI chief M Damodaran as a non-executive director, and former administrator of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Michael Whitaker as a non-executive independent director. The board also includes former Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa and Pallavi Shroff, Managing Partner of Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co, as non-executive independent directors.
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“Following the first day of the disruptions, we held an emergency board meeting and set up a crisis management group. Since then, Board members have been in continuous contact with the management team. The crisis Management team has been meeting every day. Our collective focus has been clear: restore operations, support passengers, communicate transparently, prevent this from happening again. The results are tangibly positive,” Mehta said, noting that the airline’s operations have normalised earlier than what was initially anticipated.
In a statement on Tuesday, IndiGo announced that its operations have stabilised and normalised. IndiGo operated over 1,800 flights on Tuesday, operating to all destinations on its network, and its on-time performance (OTP) is back at over 80 per cent. The airline expects to operate around 1,900 flights on Wednesday. Friday was the worst day of the disruption with over 1,600 flight cancellations, but the situation has steadily improved since.
As per the regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), IndiGo informed it that the disruptions “have arisen primarily from misjudgement and planning gaps in implementing” the second phase of new FDTL rules, with the airline accepting that the actual crew requirement for the new rules exceeded what it had anticipated. The massive disruption at IndiGo—India’s largest airline that commands over 60 per cent of the domestic market share—threw commercial flight operations out of gear all over the country.
The DGCA has allowed IndiGo some temporary exemptions from the new FDTL rules in order to help it get its act together, while also starting a probe into the disruption. IndiGo is also doing a root-cause analysis to identify the exact cause or combination of causes that led to this unprecedented disruption, which Mehta described as a “a blemish on the airline’s pristine clean record”.
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“We owe answers to our customers, to our Government, to our shareholders and equally importantly to our employees. We assure you that we will examine every aspect of what went wrong and we will learn from it. The Board has decided it will involve an external technical expert to work with the management and help determine the root causes and ensure corrective action. So that this level of disruption never occurs again,” Mehta said.
