The largest airline in the country, run by Interglobe Aviation Ltd., announced that the resignation of the IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers took place on Tuesday, March 10, following the worst-ever flight crisis experienced by the carrier in December.
IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers resigns
The airline has been temporarily taken over by the Managing Director, Rahul Bhatia.
Within a few months, just a year and a half after the newly inducted Elbers assumed the helm in September 2022, IndiGo has surpassed the 10-billion revenue milestone in its history, added more than 440 Airbus A320-family aircraft to its fleet, and ordered 500 more of them, a historic order.
However, Elbers did not see his achievements pivot on a huge operational meltdown in December 2025. The crisis that took place in the flight was caused by the inability of IndiGo to introduce new regulations aimed at avoiding the fatigue of pilots.
In the period between December 3 and 5, IndiGo cancelled more than 2500 flights and postponed almost 1900 others which affected a total of more than 300,000 passengers.
The DGCA fined Elbers a record 22.20 crore and gave show-cause notices to Elbers himself. Although he firstly withstood the demands to resign, the crisis left a great mark on the reputation of the airline in terms of punctuality.
Who is Pieter Elbers?
Pieter Elbers, born in the Netherlands in 1970, knows aviation inside out. He spent decades at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, starting back in 1992 and eventually leading the company as president and CEO from 2014 to 2022.
During his time at the top, he steered KLM through big changes and the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, all while working within the Air France-KLM group.
In 2022, Elbers switched gears and took over as CEO of IndiGo, now India’s biggest airline. Since then, he’s pushed hard for international growth, streamlined how things run, and made IndiGo’s global network stronger. People in the industry see him as a sharp, seasoned strategist, someone who really gets how this business works.
What was the IndiGo crisis?
IndiGo, the biggest airline in India, just hit a wall. Over 200 flights got cancelled, and hundreds more ran late on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Airports were packed, passengers were stuck in endless lines, and nobody seemed to know what went wrong—just a sudden mess with barely any warning.
First, crew shortages. IndiGo’s been short on pilots and cabin crew ever since new duty-time rules kicked in on November 1. Now, pilots can’t fly as many hours, and they need longer breaks.
The result? Planes ready on the runway, but no crew is legally allowed to fly them. Some flights didn’t take off simply because there was no one left to operate them. Sources say things got so tight that entire schedules fell apart because earlier crew rotations had maxed out their allowed hours.
Then there were new roster rules. These Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) are meant to cut down on pilot fatigue and boost safety. Sounds good on paper, but IndiGo runs a monster operation: more than 2,200 flights every day, with lots of them at night.
On top of that, technical glitches at airports made things worse. Delhi and Pune, two major hubs, had their check-in and departure systems crash.
And if that wasn’t enough, winter traffic piled on more trouble. Major airports were jammed with passengers, fog slowed everything down, and peak-hour congestion left IndiGo struggling to catch up.
IndiGo claims it runs more than 2,200 flights each day, but government numbers from Tuesday show only 35% left on time.
That’s over 1,400 flights delayed in a single day. And in November alone, 1,232 flights got cancelled, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.
