New Delhi: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) set up an eight-member oversight team on Wednesday to monitor IndiGo’s network and crew operations, even as the airline recovers from severe disruptions in flight operations over the last week.
Two members of the team will be deployed at the IndiGo headquarters in Gurugram and submit daily reports on various operational parameters to the regulator. Additionally, another two-member team has been deployed at the IndiGo office to monitor flight cancellations, refunds and compensation to affected passengers, the airline’s on-time performance, and return of baggage stranded during the disruption.
The DGCA has also ordered its officers to carry out “immediate on-site inspections” at 11 airports to assess “safety, operational preparedness, passenger facilitation measures, and airline responsiveness during the ongoing disruption”. These 11 airports are Nagpur, Jaipur, Bhopal, Surat, Tirupati, Vijayawada, Shirdi, Kochi, Lucknow, Amritsar, and Dehradun.
The eight-member oversight team, which consists the regulators Flight Operations Inspectors (FOIs), will look into the airline’s overall aircraft fleet, average stage length of flights, pilot numbers, network details, crew utilisation levels and other crew scheduling related matters, daily flights and crew availability, sectors affected to to crew shortage, and standby crew per day per base, as per the DGCA order, The Indian Express has reported.
On Wednesday, DGCA ordered IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers to present comprehensive data and updates pertaining to the network-wide severe disruption in the flight operations of India’s largest airline. Elbers has been instructed to appear before the DGCA on Thursday (December 11) at 3 pm, and senior officials from all relevant departments of the airline have also been directed to attend the meeting.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) and DGCA have also been holding frequent meetings with IndiGo in view of the crisis that led to hundreds of flights getting cancelled daily since the middle of last week.
On Tuesday, IndiGo said that operations had stabilised, although with a lower number of flights. The government ordered a 10 per cent cut in the airline’s flight schedule.
IndiGo is India’s largest airline with a domestic market share of nearly 65 per cent. It operates nearly 2,300 flights daily,of which about 2,150 are domestic.
A 10 per cent curtailment in domestic flights would mean that the airline’s daily scheduled flights within the country would come down to less than 1,950. However, IndiGo is currently operating a lower number of flights than that. The airline operated over 1,800 flights on Tuesday, and its on-time performance (OTP) returned to over 80 per cent. The airline expects to operate around 1,900 flights on Wednesday.
