IndiGo Seeks Temporary Exemption to Stabilize Operations Amid New Crew Rest-and-Duty Rules

After a harrowing start to December, when the operations of India’s biggest airlines unravelled over a new set of crew rest-and-duty duration rules, for now, a sense of calm has descended on the Indian skies. Riding on a temporary exemption granted to it by aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), IndiGo has over the past week managed to stabilise its operations and steadily ramp up its daily flights — up from around 700 at the peak of the chaos to over 2,050 since Saturday, December 13. Without the temporary exemption related to night operations in the new rules, IndiGo could not have staged such a rapid recovery. The answer to why IndiGo sought these specific exemptions, which will be in place till February 10, and why the regulator yielded, lies in the airline’s dominance of the night skies. Between midnight and 6 am — the new definition of ‘night’ in the revised Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules — IndiGo has more domestic arrivals and departures than any other airline by a huge margin. Which is why, when the DGCA capped at two the maximum number of landings for a pilot operating a flight — landing or taking off — in this six-hour window, the impact on IndiGo was disproportionately higher.