The civil aviation ministry has directed airlines to submit applications to operate in the vacant slots IndiGo after the airline’s winter schedule was reduced due to severe disruptions in December 2025. The move aims to redistribute capacity and maintain stability in domestic air travel, but initial comments suggest limited airline interest in the slotted slots on offer.

IndiGo, India’s largest airline with more than 2,000 daily flights, canceled 2,507 flights and delayed 1,852 between December 3 and 5, 2025, affecting more than 300,000 passengers. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) responded by imposing a 10% reduction in IndiGo’s winter schedule, freeing up several operational slots for reallocation.

On January 13, a commission on the redistribution of these places met to establish the principles of reallocation. The panel asked interested airlines to submit requests and preferences for available slots, with conditions including not disrupting existing routes to use the free ones.

Applications must be submitted through the airport operators, and final allocation decisions rest with the authorities. However, the industry response has been muted.

“No one (airline) wants to take their (IndiGo’s) slots. They leave nothing but red-eye flights, which no one wants to take. At most, they leave one flight from a station where they have six flights. Nobody, in fact, is interested in paltry slots,” an airline executive told PTI.

IndiGo’s operational woes led to regulatory scrutiny. On January 17, the DGCA announced fines totaling Rs 22.20 crore for the disruptions and issued warnings to CEO Pieter Elbers and two senior executives. The regulator also demanded a bank guarantee of Rs 50 crore from IndiGo for long-term systemic improvements.

The DGCA attributed the outages to inadequate crew management, insufficient regulatory preparation and deficiencies in system software and operational control.

“The airline’s planning processes did not adequately identify operational deficiencies or maintain sufficient operational buffers. There was an overriding focus on maximizing the utilization of crew, aircraft and network resources, which led to reduced inventory buffer margins,” the watchdog said.

He further noted that “crew rosters were designed to operate at the limits of allowable duty periods, with greater reliance on deadheads, tail swaps, extended duty patterns, and minimal recovery margins. This compromised roster integrity and operational endurance and adversely affected the implementation of the revised FDTL provisions.”

IndiGo reported a 78 percent drop in profits totaling 549.1 million rupees in the quarter ended December 2025, citing higher expenses, changes in labor laws and currency fluctuations as contributing factors.