INDIGO MESS A PLANNING FAILURE FOR BOTH AIRLINE AND THE AUTHORITIES

An airline that carries almost two-thirds of India's domestic passengers has thrown the plans of lakhs of Indians off course for nearly a week.

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And the return to normalcy is still not in sight. The IndiGo mess is not just about a low-cost carrier sticking to its highmargin model. It is about a market leader that failed to prepare and about regulators who did not see trouble building up until it spilled over into the public domain.The government relaxed the flying-time norms meant to reduce pilot fatigue only after the crisis became unmanageable. IndiGo had known for more than a year that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation's revised flight-duty limits would come into effect on November 1. Yet it claimed to be blindsided. The fallout was more than 2,000 cancelled flights, long queues at airports, and passengers stranded for up to 36 ho