Daybreak - The stress test that IndiGo failed

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

IndiGo had one of its worst weeks ever with hundreds of flights cancelled across major airports. New pilot rest rules kicked in on November 1, 2025 and the airline’s tight schedules and lean crew planning could not absorb the change. Thousands of passengers were stranded. What really happened and why did India’s biggest airline struggled so suddenly? In this episode, we look at what this means for the country’s fast growing aviation system. Because when one rule change can bring the busiest carrier to a halt the bigger question is how close to the edge we are flying?Tune in.Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two on The bro-ification of business and tech podcasts here. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. It is the 3rd of December 2025, around midnight. We are at Kemper Gorda International Airport in Bangalore,

and there is a long queue sneaking under the glare of the, the airport's fluorescent lights. A young woman is staring at the flight information board. Her flight to Delhi simply reads cancelled. Nearby, a family is huddled over their phone screens, frantically refreshing for updates. And on the other side is a businessman staring at his laptop screen and sighing. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, similar scenes are unfolding. at Hyderabad in Mumbai, in Pune, Delhi, Kolkata.

By the time the sun is up again, India's largest airline had scrubbed at least 175 flights in a single day. Its third straight day of chaos, leaving thousands and thousands of people stranded across the country. Now, let us be real. This is not just another airline having a bad week. Indigo controls about 60% of India's domestic market. It normally runs more than 2,000 flights a day with a fleet of over 400 aircrafts, mostly Airbus A320s.

And for years, it has sold itself on punctuality so hard that its crew members coined a phrase, Indigo Standard Time, which is a little bit of a dig at India's reputation for running late. And yet, on Tuesday, 2nd of December, when the dominoes just had started falling, Indigo's on-time performance collapsed to just 35%, the worst among Indian airlines that day. So what snapped inside the finely tuned maths of India's busiest airline? And what does this say about the way we fly in our country now? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host, Nidha Sharma, and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story, that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 5th of December. Normal day, Indigo runs more than 2,200 flights, shuttling people between metros, tier two cities, and a growing web of international routes.

And it is built on three main pillars. The first is one main kind of plane, mostly Airbus A320 family aircrafts. Keeps the cost low, training simple, and maintenance is predictable. The second is very tight schedules, short turnarounds, high aircraft utilization, lots of late night and early morning flights. And the third is lean staffing. Enough pilots and crew to run the schedule, but not a lot of slack if something goes wrong.

Pilot groups have called this lean manpower planning. And for years, this has worked. We've all seen it. Indigo's on-time record was usually above 80% at all. major airports. And then one rulebook changed. India's aviation regulator, the DGCA, updated something called the flight duty time limitations or FDL. And the idea is simple. Tired pilots are a safety risk. So from the 1st of November 2025, airlines were supposed to give pilots 48 hours of continuous weekly rest up from the previous 36 hours. And then,

cut their permanent night landings from six to just two in a defined night window. And also, extend what counts as night hours, meaning more flights fall into stricter limits. Now, if you think from a safety perspective, you would say this is long overdue. India's skies are busier, duty days are longer, and fatigue incidents have risen. But for Indigo, which leans heavily on late night rotations, and short-haul churn, these changes hit the core of its model. More rest meant less pilots and fewer flights. Two night landings instead of six for each pilot

meant that you cannot squeeze in as many sectors into those profitable graveyard slots. But here's the thing. The regulator had actually signaled these rules well in advance. They were announced last year and took effect from November last month. Pilot associations too have told the media that Indigo had time to prepare for this, to hire more crew, to redesign schedules, but they argued that the airline did not do enough. They accused it of years of lean manpower planning and of failing to adjust rosters in time. Now, Indigo for its part does not deny that it has been hit.

It just says that the story is a little more complicated. Stay tuned. Let us fast forward to this week when the airline's, actually flew headfirst into the storm. Within days of the full FDTL implementation, Indigo began to struggle with crew availability. At Bangalore's airport alone, 73 flights were cancelled on the 4th of December. But why such a collapse all at once? The immediate reason was, of course, what I mentioned earlier. The airline says that the implementation of stricter FDL norms disrupted crew rostering deeply. Many pilots became legally unavailable to fly night hours and for frequent rotations.

But this was not just about the rules and lack of planning. You see, roughly around the same time, another pressure point emerged. Aircraft-wide software updates, a mandatory software patch for the widely used Airbus A320 family, which forms the backbone of Indigo's fleet, and that triggered additional complications. It reduced the available number of aircrafts and added more strain to crew planning. And add to this, the onset of the busy winter travel season, adverse weather, increased airspace traffic and seasonal schedule adjustments. And these factors, which each seem manageable in isolation, combined into a perfect storm. Crew shortage, fewer aircrafts, tighter regulations and high demand. The result was a system-wide gridlock.

In November alone, according to government data, Indigo cancelled more than 1,200 flights. Of these, more than 700 were linked to FDTL issues. Now, for Indigo, this is more than just a lapse. It challenges its very brand identity. It's promised to be on time and sometimes even before time stands fractured. Financially, too, the impact was visible almost immediately. shares of its parent company Interglobe Aviation have fallen by more than 3% as I record this on Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, the regulator, DGCA has swung into action. It has summoned Indigo to explain the disruptions and submit a mitigation plan. But here is what Indigo's meltdown says about India's aviation sector. This is a wake-up call. Expansion must go hand-in-hand with capacity in crew in air-crow. craft and in contingency. Otherwise, the cost of fast growth may just be the trust of millions of people. Write to me if you have any interesting thoughts on this at podcast at the ken.com.

Also, the episode is not over yet. I have a very interesting special segment for you today, so don't go just yet. All right. So today in the studio, we have two very brave bros who are going to bear their souls on daybreak. They are Rohan Darmakomar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, the hosts of one of our most popular premium podcast, 2x2. And they recently did a very interesting episode where they basically confronted themselves.

Do you want to tell us? So the title of the podcast was the broification of business and tech podcasts, topic as well, which is about fundamentally exploring the question of Why is it that business podcasts and tech podcasts are male-dominated? Got it. And why is that the case? But was there a particular reason why you decided to confront it at this, like right now?

This is something that we've been concerned with for a while. The number of women guests on our podcasts. We have, of course, like, aware that it's way lesser than what it ought to be. Subscribers have written into us saying, asking us why aren't there more? Where are the women? But yes. Right. So we keep coming back to this theme again.

And of course, towards the end of the year, it's literally the last month of the year. So you're always in this reflective mindset saying, how did the year go by? If someone had to do an appraisal for me based on how many women did you actually manage to get on the show? Thank God, nobody's going to praise me on that. I would have gotten very poor scores because we had 5% women guests on a show across the 60%. episodes that we've done. Yeah. And if you look at, that's in terms of appearances,

but if you look at in terms of episodes, 90% of our episodes have had only male guests. So, I mean, since you guys have put in the effort to reach out and invite people to speak, why do you think women aren't, you know, coming to speak on your podcast? That is the episode. Are you asking us to give away the episode? It's an hour-long episode where we actually have two very accomplished

and outspoken women, Kosturi Ghosh, who's a partner and member of the board at Tri-Legal, and Swapnika Nag, who's the co-founder and CEO of Periscope. And as it turns out, we began the episode and the questions got turned back on us by Kosturi and we had to do a lot of reflection. Clearly, I mean, you guys think that it is an issue, right?

And you want to fix it. What would you do differently? We got a bunch of suggestions from both Kosturi and Swapnika. Some of them, of course, include things like building a wider and deeper roster of guests that we can reach out too much in

advance and build trust with them. Most importantly, we hope that this episode is a trigger for more women to also reach out to us and say we understand, we get it, but also we want to be a part of this. I mean, it's very early days

but I think it has already slowly started. I got a couple of pings today from some really accomplished women leaders whom I had not spoken to, acquaintances of mine, who reached out and said, we listen to this episode, it's very nice. And of course,

now I have a very opportunistic response back. Will you come on the next episode of two by two? But I will say that Praveen and I, though it looks like the world of business podcasting is dominated by men, there is one place where the business of business podcasting is actually not dominated by men. And that is the ken. Yes.

I mean, you two are examples. And 90,000 hours. And 90,000 hours with Rahel and Withanthri. So we're only two podcasters. And Rudanthika producer. That's right. Yes. All right.

So listeners, we'll link the episode to the show notes of this one. Do tune in and write to us with your thoughts. And appear on that two-by-two podcast. Thank you. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber focus business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch

of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.