This morning, I joined the hundreds of thousands of travellers who received the Indigo Airlines treatment this week.

Indigo Standard Time

At about 1:00 am, I received a WhatsApp message from the airline ‘warmly welcoming’ me onboard for my flight to Bengaluru at 7:10 am. Amidst the severe flight disruptions this week, the message was a welcome assurance. I left home as planned at 5:00 am. As I left, I checked my flight status on the airline’s website. It showed about a half-hour delay in departure. At 6:32 am, I received a message telling me about a revised departure time of 8:35 am.

What happened between 5:30 am and 6:30 am is worth recounting.

Inside the terminal, I saw a sea of faces. None of the Indigo counters had signage directing people to check-in or drop their bags, but all had staff. One glance at my e-boarding pass and the lady looked up to tell me that my flight was cancelled. She told me that the airline’s systems will take a while to update. She wouldn’t check-in my suitcase. I hung around the counter. Maybe the information is wrong, I thought, and it was premature for her to be categorical about the cancellation. In the meanwhile, two other passengers tried checking in and were also turned away by the lady, citing flight cancellation. She was less definite about when the refund would come, since there was no formal announcement. She noted my PNR. Handwritten on a scrap of A4 paper. The sheet had other numbers as well. Others’ PNRs, I presumed.

No further updates from the airline. The ETD continued to be 8:35 am. I wandered about aimlessly trying to figure out what next, bumping into people at every step. The air was rife with confusion, stale exhaustion and palpable anger.

My mind went back to travelling as a child, waiting for a train. Well before platform and train announcements, porters could be trusted to know. They never failed.

So, it must be true. The lady at the Indigo counter, who said my flight was cancelled, must be correct.

Heading Back. Not Just Yet.

I saw a serpentine queue with over 200 people. I guessed from the outsized suitcases that there were many who had come in from international locations hoping to catch an inland connection. The queue barely moved and stretched on endlessly. Many looked bewildered. I figured that these were people heading to the exit of the terminal after learning of cancellations. I joined the queue. At a distance, I saw a lone, busy baggage scanning machine close to one of the exits. So, that is where one needed to reach!

After about 45 minutes, it felt like I was still a couple of hours away from the exit gate. I bumped into a friend whose flight too was cancelled. Together, we slowly moved to the head of the queue, flaunted our senior citizen status and got close to the baggage scanner. There was an Indigo-staffed desk next to the machine. We had to present our boarding passes and IDs, and they dutifully noted down our details, tore off a small piece of paper, and scribbled what looked like a serial number. Armed with this little piece of paper, we proceeded to scan our bags and then presented the chit to the security guard before exiting the terminal. Phew!

People had been through much worse. Outside at a coffee shop, we met a woman who had spent close to 14 hours at the airport, First, she had waited many hours to board her flight only to be told at some stage that her flight was cancelled. She had spent the next few hours trying to retrieve her checked-in bags, and finally, in the the last couple of hours, had worked her way out of the terminal.

Poor Customer Management, Not Mere Slippages

It was evident that the airline didn’t just falter, it tumbled and fell hard on its face.

• Staff manning the counters were overwhelmed and were severely handicapped by the lack of accurate flight information.
• Staff seemed to be passing on their best guesses about flight cancellations as authentic information from the ‘inside track’.
• There was little evidence to suggest that supervisory personnel were present or were there in adequate numbers.
• Queue management was non-existent; queues had a mind of their own. Queue management separators at the check-in/bag drop areas could have been repositioned to manage queues near the exit, which were multiplying at will and creating choke points.
• Flight status updates on the website and at the airport were erratic, and departure times became a moving goal post. There were no clear answers as to how long one should wait at the terminal for official pronouncements. Does one peer at the small display screens? We must remember that this was a ‘silent’ airport.
• Given the extraordinary circumstances, it wasn’t clarified when refunds would kick in, whether it would be automatic and whether there would be modifications to facilitate shorter wait times to become eligible for refunds.
• More X-ray machines and more counters were needed to clear irate passengers exiting the terminal after their flights were cancelled.
• It was never made clear why baggage needed to be screened on the way out. They were not screened on the way in.

There were no help desks, helplines or real-time updated information on the website. Anyone visiting the website got the impression that it was business as usual and ‘all iz well’. There was total silence on the chaos and disruptions brought on by the cancellation and rescheduling of flights. No explanations. No indication of when the situation was expected to improve. No apology. Nothing.

DGCA: Where Are You?

Indigo Airlines, with its near-monopoly status, failed us spectacularly this week.

Has Indigo become too big to bother?

It is apparent that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) failed to track the preparedness of airlines following the announcement of revised FDTL rules and monitor airlines’ operations and staffing. If memory serves, last year, all airlines sought a deferment of the new rules, pleading that they would need to make new hires, rejig rosters and rework the economics of flying itself. The DGCA was not tough on airlines for reasons that one can only guess. It woke up after this crisis erupted. As a regulator, it has failed us one more time. Are the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MCA) and the DGCA beholden to the airlines, aircraft manufacturers and aviation infrastructure builders to a point that their independence in shaping policy and regulatory function is seriously in question?

Meanwhile, it appears that my flight—which I was told by was cancelled—took off at 10 am, 2 hours and 50 minutes late, and last I checked was en route to Bengaluru without me.

At home, breakfast and laundry done, and this post nearly done, let me gratefully recall in this period of great uncertainty the one thing that is unerringly on time—the phone alarm that went off as expected at 3:45 am and 4:00 am this morning, and on all earlier occasions.