New Delhi, Dec 5: IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers issued a public apology this evening after more than a thousand flights were cancelled today, making it the "most severely impacted day" in terms of cancellations. The biggest airline of the country cancelled "more than half" of its daily number of flights on Friday, said Elbers. He also said that even though the crisis will persist on Saturday, the airline anticipates fewer than 1,000 flight cancellations.
"Full normalisation is expected between December 10 and 15, though IndiGo cautions that recovery will take time due to the scale of operations," the IndiGo CEO said.
IndiGo operates around 2,300 domestic and international flights daily.
Pieter Elbers, while apologising for the major inconvenience due to delays and cancellations, said the situation is a result of various causes.
The crisis at IndiGo stems from new regulations that boost pilots' weekly rest requirements by 12 hours to 48 and allow only two night-time landings per week, down from six. IndiGo has attributed the mass cancellations to "misjudgment and planning gaps".
Elbers also listed three lines of action that the airline will adopt to address the issue.
"Firstly, customer communication and addressing your needs, for this, messages have been sent on social media. And just now, a more detailed communication with information, refunds, cancellations and other customer support measures was sent," he said.
The airline has also stepped up its call centre capacity.
"Secondly, due to yesterday's situation, we had customers stranded mostly at the nation's largest airports. Our focus was for all of them to be able to travel today itself, which will be achieved. For this, we also ask customers whose flights are cancelled not to come to the airports as notifications are sent," the CEO said.
"Thirdly, cancellations were made for today to align our crew and planes to be where they need to start tomorrow morning afresh. Earlier measures of the last few days, regrettable, have proven not to be enough, but we have decided today to reboot all our systems and schedules, resulting in the highest numbers of cancellations so far, but imperative for progressive improvements starting from tomorrow," he added.
As airports witnessed chaotic scenes, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) stepped in to grant IndiGo a temporary exemption from stricter night duty rules for pilots. It also allowed substitution of leaves with a weekly rest period.
Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu has said a high-level inquiry will be ordered and accountability will be fixed.
Comments
Adani Ready to run out of country... Preparing public that govt has warned before... thats Y name is mentioned.
Where can i get the full 9.5k Companies names?
As because Adani is most favoured child of our government. Truth is always bitter for you and left to you , you would have excluded Adani's name.
why mention only Adani's name, publish the detailed list of all the 9500, high risk NBFC's
why mention only Adani's name, publish the detailed list of all the 9500, high risk NBFC's
If Govt has to release such a list for obevious reasons... clearly Banks are miserably failing to do their job!
So what is one expected to do? Take loans from these companies or dont invest in these companies. Should employees of these companies start looking for Jobs?. This is a meaningless exercise just to tell people that we had warned you.
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