Weeks after facing widespread flight cancellations and chaos across airports, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IndiGo Airlines, Pieter Elbers, told his employees that the “worst is behind us”.
Photo: IANS
Weeks after facing widespread flight cancellations and chaos across airports, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IndiGo Airlines, Pieter Elbers, told his employees that the “worst is behind us”.
In a video message, Elbers thanked the IndiGo staff for their efforts and stated that on December 9, he announced that the airline’s operations had started stabilising.
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He said the airline had restored 2,200 flights on Thursday, adding that the last two weeks were very challenging.
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Elbers urged the employees to now focus on three things: resilience, root cause analysis, and rebuilding.
Elaborating further, he said the focus of the airline is now to solidify operations and to ensure that the operations are stable as the bad weather and IROPS (Irregular Operations) season begin this week.
“What we witnessed seems a compounding effect of several factors, and everyone wants answers,” he said.
The CEO stated that the airline needs a full-scale analysis, for which an external aviation expert has been appointed by the Board to conduct a comprehensive root cause analysis.
The root cause analysis and the inputs from the staff will help the airline “rebuild itself in a better way”. “Let these three days (December 3-December 5) not define what we have collectively built over 19 years,” the CEO said.
IndiGo saw a near-total meltdown of its operations, with over 5,000 flights cancelled in the first 10 days.
The airline had informed the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) that there were planning gaps in rostering pilots and misjudgment in assessing pilot availability, as per the new DGCA rules for pilot rest and duty hours that came into effect on November 1.
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