Domestic carrier IndiGo on Saturday cancelled 57 flights across its network, citing adverse weather conditions at multiple airports, according to information available on the airline’s website. The airline has also cancelled 13 flights scheduled for Sunday so far, with most attributed to forecasted bad weather and two due to operational reasons.
IndiGo has been facing intermittent disruptions for over a week, largely due to weather-related challenges, even as it continues to operate under regulatory scrutiny following large-scale cancellations earlier this month. The airline had cancelled thousands of flights in early December after stricter pilot duty time and rest norms came into effect.
The flights cancelled on Saturday impacted several key airports, including Chandigarh, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Amritsar, Bengaluru, Delhi, Gaya, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur and Pune, among others.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has designated the period from December 10 to February 10 as the official winter fog window. Under DGCA’s CAT-IIIB fog operation norms, airlines are required to deploy pilots trained for low-visibility operations and aircraft equipped with CAT-IIIB systems to ensure safe landings during dense fog.
Category III landing systems allow aircraft to land in poor visibility conditions. While CAT-III A permits landings with a runway visual range (RVR) of up to 200 metres, CAT-III B enables operations with visibility of less than 50 metres.
IndiGo’s operations remain under close DGCA monitoring. Following disruptions earlier this month, the government directed the airline to operate a curtailed schedule. Although IndiGo was initially approved to run 15,014 domestic flights per week under its winter schedule, the regulator reduced this by 10 per cent after the airline cancelled nearly 1,600 flights in a single day due to revised pilot rest requirements.
As a result, IndiGo is currently capped at operating around 1,930 domestic flights per day, down from the originally planned 2,144 daily flights for the winter season.
