New Delhi: The major technical glitch in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in Delhi that played havoc with flight schedules for nearly two days between Thursday and Friday could have been avoided had authoritiess paid heed to warnings by the Air Traffic Controllers’ Guild (India).
The Guild had, in July this year, cautioned the government and aviation regulators that the country’s automation network was showing signs of “performance degradation”, including data lags and processing delays at key airports such as Delhi and Mumbai.
It had urged that air navigation systems be upgraded to global benchmarks followed by agencies such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Eurocontrol. It flagged the absence of predictive tools, artificial intelligence-based conflict detection and real-time data sharing that are now standard internationally.
India Today has reported that a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport had echoed similar concerns in its July report, noting that India’s ATC infrastructure had not kept pace with the rapid growth of air traffic.
The committee has described the system as “showing significant performance degradation” and warned that outdated technology was placing “enormous additional cognitive strain” on controllers. The panel had called for a technical audit, a time-bound modernisation roadmap and the integration of AI-driven safety tools.
The disruption originated in the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), a digital backbone that routes flight plans, weather updates and coordination messages between pilots and radar stations. When the system crashed early on Friday morning, controllers were forced to revert to manual coordination using phones and handwritten clearances, severely slowing operations.
The Airports Authority of India (AAI) said that the issue began on Thursday evening and persisted for more than 15 hours, delaying over 800 flights and leading to nearly 100 cancellations. Engineers from the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) were called in to restore the system, which was stabilised by Friday night. However, it took several more hours for flight schedules to normalise due to the cascading effect.
Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu visited the ATC of IGI Airport on Saturday evening and and directed a detailed root-cause analysis.
“Visited the ATC Tower at Delhi Airport today to review operations after the technical glitch in the ATC messaging system. Over the past two days, teams from AAI, ANS, and ECIL worked tirelessly to identify and resolve the issue while ensuring passenger safety through manual coordination. As systems are fully restored now, I have further directed officials to conduct a detailed root-cause analysis and enhance system redundancy to make our ATC network more resilient for the future,” the minister posted on X.
