Skewed pilot planning at IndiGo resulted in at least 200 flights getting cancelled on Wednesday (December 3, 2025) and massive delays of up to 12 hours exacerbated by some cabin crew no shows in Mumbai that forced the airline to issue an apology.

Weeks of escalating delays at IndiGo reached a tipping point on Wednesday (December 3).

There was sloganeering against the airline at Delhi airport as passengers gathered at the boarding gate to protest a six-hour delay of a flight to Rajkot. The flight was scheduled to take off at 5.40 a.m. and finally departed at 11.30 a.m. There were similar scenes at other airports like Mumbai, where passengers were forced to return after waiting for 5-8 hours, when for example the Mumbai to Patna flight scheduled to depart at 11.15 a.m. was delayed multiple times with the latest update suggesting an 8 p.m. departure.

At Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport, 62 IndiGo flights were cancelled for the second consecutive day. As many as 31 IndiGo flights were cancelled in Hyderabad. In Delhi, 37 flights were cancelled.

The crisis in pilot availability blamed by its pilots on poor planning is such that rostering teams have been appealing to them for the past several weeks to cancel sick leave and the management has even offered to pay 1.5 times the salary to those who forego their privilege leave. But this has not helped matters and the airline was forced to cancel 200 flights on Wednesday and 130 flights on Tuesday, pilots were informed. 

Government data showed that only 35% of the airline’s flights were on time on December 2, and 49.5% were on time on December 1. 

The pilot crisis is triggered by the full implementation of the stricter rest and duty norms for them effective November 1, which was delayed by the government by a year to help airlines plan their crew requirement as they had warned of widespread flight cancellations. The implementation came only after pilot bodies approached the Delhi High Court and obtained an order in April 2025.

In a press statement the airline acknowledged this was among “a multitude of unforeseen operational challenges” that resulting in “significant disruption across the network” over the past two days for which it apologised to its customers.

These reasons, it said, included “minor technology glitches, schedule changes linked to the winter season, adverse weather conditions, increased congestion in the aviation system and the implementation of updated crew rostering rules”.

This had a “compounding impact on our operations” in a way the airline had not anticipated, IndiGo said.

It order to restore normalcy the airline will be making adjustments to its schedules over the next 48 hours, implying further cancellation of flights.

The new norms for pilot rest and duty hours framed to combat concerns over mounting fatigue, against which airlines waged a two year long battle, were to be implemented in two phases as per a Delhi High Court order in April 2025. While a large number of provisions including raising of weekly rest hours from 36 hours to 48 hours were rolled out from July 1, the remaining provisions restricting the utilisation of pilots during night hours were to be implemented from November 1.

It is since the implementation of the latter that the airline has been grappling with shortages and making requests to pilots to cancel their leaves. But a brewing unrest for past many years means pilots are in no mood to co-operate. Being pushed to the upper limit of 13 hours of duty period allowed under DGCA norms, no salary hikes despite profits to the tune of ₹7,000 crore being posted by the airline combined with the latest furore over the airline twisting the meaning of the new norms on pilot duty hours to its advantage has angered them deeply.

Pilot body Airline Pilot’s Association (ALPA) India, which had raised some of these issues before the DGCA last week, in a press statement warned on Wednesday that airlines must not cite the new norms to obtain a rollback of these norms as the airline had “failed at proactive resource planning”. It added that any relaxations offered by the regulator compromise passenger and crew safety as the duty norms are aimed at combating fatigue.