The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has effectively taken operational command of IndiGo by stationing an eight-member oversight team directly inside the airline’s Gurgaon headquarters, with two senior inspectors now permanently embedded on-site every single day to conduct real-time audits of fleet utilisation, crew rostering, pilot strength, average stage length, network load distribution, and every critical parameter that has contributed to weeks of nationwide chaos.

CEO Pieter Elbers has been formally summoned to personally appear before DGCA headquarters by Thursday afternoon, accompanied by the entire top leadership, armed with exhaustive data on flight restoration timelines, pilot and cabin crew hiring pipelines, training academy throughput, exact refund disbursement figures, rerouting statistics, baggage reconciliation status, and a minute-by-minute account of how the airline intends to stabilise operations before the peak Christmas-New Year travel period.

A dedicated deputy director and a senior statistical officer have also been planted inside IndiGo’s nerve centre with direct access to live cancellation dashboards, refund processing queues, on-time performance feeds, baggage tracking systems, and compensation payout logs, mandated to transmit daily situation reports straight to the Joint Director General, effectively placing the airline under 24/7 regulatory lockdown.

Also Read: Centre Deploys Top Officers to 10 Airports as IndiGo Crisis Paralyzes Travel

The sweeping intervention follows the DGCA’s forced 10-percent winter schedule cut—slashing 214 flights daily—and comes after IndiGo cancelled a staggering 4,290 domestic flights and 64 international services between December 1 and 9 alone, issued over ₹2,000 crore in refunds for nearly 21 lakh cancelled tickets, and left thousands of passengers stranded with more than 750 bags still missing as of Wednesday evening.

With the crisis now in its third week and triggered primarily by IndiGo’s failure to anticipate the manpower impact of revised Flight Duty Time Limitation norms, Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu confirmed that the ministry’s crisis control room remains on war footing, vowing zero tolerance until every affected passenger receives full redressal and the airline demonstrates credible, verifiable recovery.

Also Read: IndiGo Back to Normal: 65,000 Staff Mobilised to Fix Flight Crisis