Sukumar SAH
India’s aviation sector has always lived on the edge, but the sudden, dramatic grounding of IndiGo flights has forced the industry to confront a truth it has long avoided – the country’s aviation boom is being powered by an understaffed, overstretched workforce.
What crippled IndiGo, an airline held up as the gold standard for punctuality and operational discipline, was not an aircraft glitch, a fuel shock or a regulatory penalty; it was a shortage of trained pilots, a problem quietly accumulating for years until it finally erupted into a full-blown national crisis last week.
The airline did not take the human resource requirements seriously enough. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had notified stricter Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules in January 2024. Airlines sought more time for implementation, which was granted to them. By November 1, 2025, all airlines had to be fully compliant. But this is where IndiGo faltered badly.
It kept flying with overstretched and lower manpower. Against the stipulated 48 hours of weekly rest, it kept running pilots and crew with only 36 hours of rest, against the required number of two night landings per week per pilot, IndiGo persisted with six night landings.
When a cluster of pilots called in sick and rosters buckled under strain, the airline found itself unable to cope. Delays spiralled, aircraft were stranded out of position, and passengers across the country were left scrambling for alternatives.
This led the Government and regulator into initiating an unusually intensive, multi-layered intervention. The Ministry of Civil Aviation instructed IndiGo to reduce its winter schedule by about 10 per cent to realign operations with available crew and prevent further chaos.
Alongside, multiple committees and oversight mechanisms were activated. A four-member DGCA inquiry panel was formed to examine the root causes of the breakdown. An eight-member oversight team was deployed to monitor IndiGo’s daily functioning in real time.
Even Parliament entered the picture, with the Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Civil Aviation summoning officials from IndiGo, the DGCA and the ministry.
The Delhi High Court, on its part, criticised the Centre and the regulator for delayed response, questioning why action was taken only after the situation worsened. “You allowed the situation to precipitate and only then did you take action. Why did you allow all this to happen?” a Bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Tushar Rao Gedela asked.
The entire IndiGo episode did not occur in isolation; it was the inevitable outcome of a sector where growth has outrun talent supply year after year. India’s airlines have ordered hundreds — indeed thousands — of new aircraft, but their ability to staff those planes has not kept pace.
Projections warn that once the 1,700 aircraft currently on order are delivered, India will need an additional 30,000 pilots to operate them. Meanwhile, the current active pilot base is inadequate. Though some reports claim there are 8,000–9,000 active pilots, a substantial portion – 2,000 to 3,000 – aren’t flying regularly.
Pilot-training capacity has not kept pace. India today issues around 1,600 Commercial Pilot Licences (CPLs) annually. Industry forecasts suggest the country will need 1,700-1,800 new pilots every year over the next decade. On paper, this appears to be a modest shortfall. But the real gap is not the number of licences issued – it is how few of those licence-holders are truly cockpit-ready.
A large proportion lack type-ratings, simulator hours or the operational proficiency airlines require. The result: even as India produces a steady stream of CPLs, very few can be deployed as First Officers, and even fewer progress to Commanders.
At the same time, experienced Indian pilots continue to be hired away by better-paying carriers abroad, further thinning the domestic talent pool. The pressure on the system is unrelenting. Airlines often operate with lean rosters, leaving little room for disruption.
Pilots work close to duty-time limits, engineers are overstretched, and ground staff function under chronic manpower shortages. In such an environment, even a minor shock can trigger cascading failures.
Infrastructure constraints compound these vulnerabilities. India’s busiest airports operate at near-saturation during peak hours, and secondary airports are fast approaching similar limits.
The parallel scarcity of trained air-traffic controllers, technicians, marshallers and ground-handling personnel means that even the existing infrastructure often functions with thin operational buffers.
The deeper significance of the IndiGo fiasco lies not only in what it reveals about aviation – but also what it signals about India’s broader economic trajectory. A similar skilled-manpower crisis is already surfacing across sectors that anchor India’s growth ambitions.
Renewable energy projects are expanding faster than the availability of specialised grid engineers. Manufacturing plants under the ‘Make in India’ push struggle to find trained machine operators, QC personnel, and maintenance experts.
Semiconductor initiatives, despite large investments, face acute shortages of technicians and process engineers. Even healthcare — one of India’s strongest service sectors — continues to grapple with insufficient nurses, imaging technicians and specialist doctors.
What links these challenges is a single structural flaw: capacity-creation has become the headline while capability-creation has lagged behind. India has built airports, highways, factories, solar parks, data centres at impressive speed — but has not built, at the same pace, the skilled workforce required to operate, maintain and scale these assets.
Addressing these challenges will require far more than temporary fixes. India needs a long-term aviation manpower strategy that aligns fleet growth with training capacity, ensures predictable career pathways, and builds resilience through staffing buffers rather than wafer-thin efficiency targets.
Airlines must be encouraged — if not mandated — to invest meaningfully in training infrastructure. The regulator must develop early-warning systems capable of flagging manpower stress before it becomes a crisis. And the broader skilling ecosystem must shift focus from short-term courses to deep, technical proficiency that industries can rely on.
What crippled IndiGo was a shortage of trained pilots, a problem quietly accumulating for years until it finally erupted into a full-blown national crisis last week