Recently from Dec1-8th 2025, news headlines are all about our favourite domestic airline Indigo (or as netizens are wrathfully terming it Itdidn'tgo airlines) suspending flights, cancelling flights en masse and leaving passengers in the lurch in the most busy holiday season. The scenes of chaos and confusion at the airports were uniformly seen whether it was Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur or Kolkata. The main cause seems to be New Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) rules enforced from November 2025 which mandated stricter pilot rest hours and night duty norms, causing acute cockpit crew shortages as IndiGo failed to prepare adequately despite a year's notice.
IndiGo's December 2025 flight cancellations directly affected at least 586,705 passengers through ticket cancellations between December 1 and 7 alone, as reported by the Indian government. Thousands more were stranded at major airports like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad due to the disruptions, with the crisis coinciding with peak wedding and holiday travel seasons. The airline processed refunds totaling over ₹610 crore (later ₹827 crore) for impacted passengers, indicating the scale of those seeking compensation for cancellations and severe delays.
If we go by statistics such major disruptions are rare but not unprecedented.
Examples of large scale flight disruptions over past 5 years
IT Outages
The 2024 CrowdStrike incident caused a global IT outage on July 19, leading to over 5,000 flight cancellations worldwide as airlines like Delta in USA faced system failures. Delta alone canceled more than 7,000 flights over five days, stranding 1.3 million passengers due to crew scheduling issues and prolonged recovery. A Microsoft Azure outage compounded the problem, affecting Windows systems across airlines, railways, and other sectors.
Weather Events
Hurricane Debby struck Florida from August 3-5, 2024, canceling over 6,000 flights and impacting 1.5 million passengers with ripple effects in Europe. Storms and flooding in Switzerland and Norway on June 28, 2024, disrupted Zurich and Geneva airports, affecting nearly 1.8 million passengers through damaged air traffic control systems. In November 2025, an Airbus A320 solar radiation recall grounded nearly 6,000 planes worldwide for safety checks, causing widespread cancellations at 40 US airports.
Strikes and Labor Issues
A WestJet mechanics strike in Canada from June 28-30, 2024, canceled 47% of scheduled flights, affecting over 110,000 passengers domestically and 1.25 million including international routes. IndiGo in India faced its worst crisis in December 2025, canceling over 2,000 flights daily due to staff shortages and new crew regulations, prompting government airfare caps.
Technical and Infrastructure Failures
A UK air traffic control fault on July 30, 2025, lasted 20 minutes but led to 150 cancellations and ongoing delays. A substation fire near London Heathrow on March 20, 2025, shut the airport for nearly 24 hours, causing mass cancellations at Europe's busiest hub. An August 2023 UK ATC outage, for comparison, affected 700,000 passengers with 500 cancellation.
During the covid years (2020-2022) few flights were operational in India.
Indian airlines operated minimal flights during the COVID-19 lockdown from March 25 to May 24, 2020, with passenger services fully suspended for 60 days, leading to a 33% drop in March 2020 traffic from 11.5 million to 7.8 million passengers compared to 2019. Domestic flights resumed at 33% capacity in May 2020, gradually increasing to full capacity by late 2021, while international operations remained severely curtailed through 2022 due to restrictions and low demand. Overall, the sector saw massive capacity cuts, with airlines like IndiGo and SpiceJet prioritizing cargo flights amid near-zero passenger operations in peak lockdown periods
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