IndiGo did not flag troubles during Dec I meet: Minister

IndiGo did not flag any trouble with adapting to the revised crew fatigue rules during a meeting with the civil aviation regulator on December 1, a day before operational problems at India's biggest airline became apparent, civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said on Monday.

- Dheer Chawla and Neha LM Tripathi

The crisis, which has affected at least 4,600 flights and millions of passengers since December 2, was caused by IndiGo's crew rostering system and internal planning, he said. IndiGo on Monday claimed a "compounding effect of multiple factors" was responsible for the chaos.

"On December 1, we held a meeting with IndiGo regarding FDTL (Flight Duty Time Limitations) when they sought clarifications, and we provided them. They did not flag any issues then, and everything was running normally," Naidu told Rajya Sabha, on a day IndiGo cancelled more than 450 flights and delayed hundreds more as the airline struggled to bring its operations back on track.

In an interview with HT, he said DGCA met with airlines, but IndiGo did not "raise any issue with them nor did they inform them about any trouble they were facing, if any." It was not immediately clear what the specifics of the meeting on December 1 were. That meet was held exactly a month after the revised FDTL rostering norms came into effect. A day later, on December 2, IndiGo cancelled over 100 flights, leaving thousands stranded.

Naidu said "we took control of the situation at airports," on December 3.