IndiGo cancels 57 flights due to 'bad weather' at various airports

Mumbai, Dec 27 (PTI) Domestic carrier IndiGo on Saturday cancelled 57 flights across its network, citing “bad weather" at various airports, according to the airline's website.

The airline has also cancelled 13 flights, as of now, for Sunday, with two of them for "operational reasons", and the remaining largely due to "forecasted bad weather".

The Gurugram-headquartered IndiGo, which cancelled thousands of flights early this month on account of stricter norms related to the pilots' duty period and rest, have been cancelling some flights for more than one week now on account of "bad weather".

The 57 flights cancelled on Sunday include from Chandigarh, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Amritsar, Bengaluru, Delhi, Gaya, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur and Pune, among others.

Aviation regulator DGCA has announced the period between December 10 and February 10 next year as the official fog window this winter.

As part of the DGCA fog operations (CAT-IIIB) norms, airlines have to mandatorily roster pilots who are trained to operate in low-visibility conditions, as well as deploy a CAT-IIIB-compliant aircraft fleet for such operations.

Category-III is an advanced navigation system that empowers an aircraft to land under foggy conditions.

Category-III-A is a precision instrument approach and landing that enables a plane to land with a runway visual range (RVR) of 200 metres, while Category-III-B helps in landing with an RVR of under 50 metres.

IndiGo, whose operations are under DGCA monitoring after the cancellations of thousands of flights early this month, is already operating a curtailed schedule in compliance with the government's order.

Under its original winter flight schedule, the airline was permitted to operate 15,014 domestic flights per week, or about 2,144 flights per day, roughly six per cent higher than the 14,158 weekly flights it operated during the summer schedule of 2025.

However, after the massive disruptions, which saw the airline cancelling 1,600 flights on a single day on account of new rest norms for pilots, which allow more rest to the pilots, the government cut down the airline's domestic flight schedule by 10 per cent or 214 flights per day.

As a result of that, IndiGo cannot operate more than 1,930 flights per day on domestic routes under its current winter schedule. PTI IAS MR MR