NEW DELHI — IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers on Friday said that given the size, scale and complexity of the airline’s operations, it will take some time to return to a fully normal situation, “which we do anticipate between the 10 to 15th of December.”
In a video message addressing passengers amid the unprecedented cancellations that have disrupted travel across the country, Elbers apologized to customers and said the situation stems from multiple causes. He added that the company is now implementing new measures to stabilize operations.
“We have experienced severe operational disruptions for the past few days. Since then, the crisis continued to aggravate, with today, December 5th, being the most severely impacted day with the number of cancellations well over a thousand or more than half of our number of daily flights,” Elbers said.
“I, on behalf of all of us at Indigo, would like to extend our sincerest apologies for the major inconvenience this has caused to many of our customers on account of delays or cancellations,” he added.
The CEO, whose airline controls more than 60 per cent of India’s domestic aviation market, said that amid the chaos and significant miscommunication, the company has defined three lines of action: stronger customer communication, ensuring stranded passengers can travel at the earliest, and aligning crew and aircraft positions for a system reset.
“The situation is a result of various causes, yet for you as a customer, it’s important how we as Indigo address this. We have defined three lines of action,” Elbers said.
For the first measure, he said IndiGo has issued updates on social media and will provide detailed information on refunds, cancellations and customer support. He added that the company has increased call center capacity.
“Secondly, due to yesterday’s situation, we had customers stranded mostly at the nation’s largest airport. 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 airports as notifications are sent,” he noted.
The third step involves today’s large-scale cancellations, made to realign crew and aircraft so operations can restart cleanly the next morning. Elbers admitted that earlier measures taken in recent days “have proven not to be enough.”
“So we’ve decided today for a reboot of all our systems and schedules, resulting in the highest number of cancellations so far, but imperative for progressive improvements starting from tomorrow,” he said.
“With these actions, we expect tomorrow to have cancellations below 1,000,” Elbers added.
He thanked the Directorate General of Civil Aviation for providing temporary relief on flight duty time limitation (FDTL) requirements during the disruption.
“Still, there’s lots of work in progress, but going forward from here, in alignment with the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the DGCA, we do expect to further improve every day,” he said.
Meanwhile, the government said it has ordered a high-level inquiry into the massive IndiGo disruption. The panel will examine what went wrong, assign accountability where required, and propose measures to prevent similar crises in the future to ensure passengers are not subjected to such hardships again. (Source: IANS)
