Bengaluru: IndiGo, India’s largest airline, on Wednesday said several of its flights were delayed and some cancelled over the past few days due to technology issues, airport congestion and operational requirements.
The airline had an on-time performance of just 35% on Tuesday, according to data from the civil aviation ministry, the lowest among all Indian airlines. IndiGo’s on-time performance this year has typically been higher than 80% at major Indian airports including Delhi and Mumbai.
The disruptions follow an air-traffic-control system outage at India’s capital airport that delayed hundreds of flights for several airlines last month. Around 600 flights were delayed as of 0909 GMT on Wednesday across India’s three busiest airports – Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru – with Delhi accounting for more than two-thirds of the delays, according to data from Flightradar24.
“Our teams are working diligently to ensure that operations normalise as soon as possible,” an IndiGo spokesperson said in a statement, without providing details on the reasons behind the delays and cancellations. The airline and other global carriers had to fix a software glitch on 200 Airbus A320 planes on Saturday.
IndiGo’s shares fell 2% after the company’s statement was released, though they have gained nearly 23% so far this year.
IndiGo, which has a domestic market share of more than 60%, operates over 2,200 flights daily and has been steadily expanding internationally, challenging rival Air India’s dominance. But its results have come under pressure in the last two quarters due to a strong U.S. dollar and as flyer sentiment took a hit after a deadly Air India crash in June.
Air India had an on-time performance of 67.2% on Tuesday. It said on Tuesday that a third-party system disruption had been affecting check-in systems at various airports, resulting in delays for a number of airlines.
On Wednesday, Delhi Airport said in a post on X that some domestic airlines were experiencing “operational challenges,” which could lead to delays or schedule changes.
(Reporting by Chandini Monnappa, Abhijith Ganaparavam, Hritam Mukherjee, Aditi Shah, Nandan Mandayam; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Thomas Derpinghaus)
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