Domestic air travel in India is again under strain as a wave of fresh flight cancellations and schedule cuts by major carriers, including IndiGo, Akasa Air and SpiceJet, ripple across key routes. In the latest round of disruption, over a dozen flights have been withdrawn or scrubbed at short notice, affecting connections to and from Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Chandigarh and several other important hubs. The turbulence comes on the heels of a bruising winter and an ongoing capacity and regulatory crunch that has left passengers wary and the aviation ecosystem on edge.
A Fresh Round of Cancellations Hits Core Indian Routes
In recent days, IndiGo, India’s largest carrier by market share, has quietly trimmed parts of its domestic schedule even as it grapples with the fallout from its December disruption, which stranded more than 1.6 million domestic passengers. While much of the public attention has focused on its long-haul pullback to Europe and the United Kingdom, the pain is being felt just as acutely on home turf, where tactical cancellations are eroding reliability on busy trunk routes that feed Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.
At Chandigarh, where IndiGo operates as the dominant low-cost player, the airline has already cancelled at least eleven departures on a single day citing dense fog and the need to “prioritise safety and minimise extended waiting at the airport.” Those cancellations have included flights linking the city with Chennai, Mumbai and other metros, effectively severing or thinning vital north–south and east–west links and forcing passengers into long layovers or costly last-minute rebookings via Delhi.
SpiceJet and Akasa Air have also cut frequencies or cancelled select services as they navigate the same mix of winter weather, congestion and operational constraints. While their absolute numbers are smaller compared with IndiGo, the resulting gaps are more keenly felt on routes where only two or three carriers operate, such as secondary city pairs from Guwahati or tier-two links into Chennai and Kolkata. What had become dependable daily services for business travellers, students and medical tourists are now subject to last-minute changes that can upend carefully planned itineraries.
For many flyers, the headline figures of cancellations are less important than the specific routes affected. A single cancelled morning departure from a city like Guwahati to Kolkata or Mumbai can mean missed international connections, forfeited hotel nights and critical delays in time-sensitive travel, from medical appointments to exam schedules. With limited spare capacity in the system, same-day alternatives are often scarce or priced beyond the reach of budget-conscious travellers.
From Scheduling Crisis to Systemic Strain
The latest cancellations cannot be viewed in isolation. They come hard on the heels of IndiGo’s December 2025 scheduling crisis, when the carrier failed to smoothly adjust crew rosters to comply with new flight duty time limitations introduced by India’s aviation regulator. Over roughly ten days starting in early December, IndiGo cancelled around 4,500 flights and saw punctuality plunge to single digits, triggering a nationwide cascade of delays and diversions.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation responded by capping fares, ordering expedited refunds and granting IndiGo a temporary exemption from the strictest crew work-time rules until February 2026. That reprieve bought the airline time to recruit more pilots and rebuild schedules, but it also underlined the fragility of a system operating near its limits. Even before the crisis peaked, analysts had flagged high utilisation of aircraft, tight turnaround times and limited staffing buffers as key vulnerabilities.
Other airlines have had their own headaches. Weather-related disruptions, technical issues and infrastructure bottlenecks have combined to push cancellation rates higher across the sector, with SpiceJet historically among the carriers recording elevated cancellation percentages. Akasa Air, though smaller and relatively newer, has had to tread carefully in adding capacity while ensuring operational resilience. The net effect is a domestic network that has little slack to absorb shocks, whether from regulatory changes, geopolitical tension or bouts of extreme weather.
This background of systemic strain helps explain why a fresh round of cancellations, even if numerically modest, can cause outsized disruption. When an IndiGo flight from Chandigarh to Chennai disappears from the board, there may be no easy way to re-accommodate hundreds of stranded passengers on the same day. Alternate carriers may be sold out, flying only on alternate days, or routing passengers through crowded hubs with extended connections that stretch journeys from a few hours into full-day odysseys.
Weather, Airspace Restrictions and Congested Airports
Weather has been a key factor in the most recent spate of disruptions, particularly in northern India where dense winter fog routinely snarls flight operations. At Chandigarh, drastically reduced visibility has led airlines to cancel and consolidate flights rather than risk extended ground holds and rolling delays that clog stands and strain already stretched staff. While safety is non-negotiable, the practical consequence is a thinning of the day’s departures, with knock-on effects reverberating down the route map to Chennai, Mumbai, Goa and beyond.
Weather is not the only variable. India’s airspace has also seen periods of heightened restriction amid episodes of geopolitical tension. In 2025, IndiGo cancelled multiple services between Chennai and Chandigarh after Indian authorities tightened airspace controls in sensitive northern corridors following cross-border strikes. Those measures, while rooted in national security considerations, had immediate and disruptive consequences for civilian traffic, forcing airlines to either suspend routes or invest in longer, more circuitous routings that upset established schedules.
On the ground, congestion at major airports has become an increasingly thorny challenge. Mumbai and Delhi, India’s busiest hubs, are running close to saturation at peak hours, limiting airlines’ ability to add relief flights or retime operations when things go wrong. Even a modest wave of cancellations and delays can quickly result in queues for take-off and landing slots, bottlenecks at gates and baggage belts, and weary passengers stuck in terminals as rebooked flights push into late-night or early-morning windows.
At Kolkata, the fallout from IndiGo’s December meltdown was significant enough to drag down the airport’s quarterly service ranking despite stable passenger satisfaction scores. The airport’s experience illustrates how a disruption triggered by one airline’s operational challenges quickly becomes a shared problem across the ecosystem, from air traffic control and ground handlers to security staff and other carriers trying to run their own operations amid the chaos.
Rising Fares and Shrinking Options for Travellers
For passengers, the most visible and painful side effect of repeated disruptions has been a surge in ticket prices. Each wave of cancellations tightens already constrained capacity, and the resulting mismatch between demand and supply is quickly reflected in dynamic pricing algorithms. During IndiGo’s December crisis, last-minute one-way tickets on rival carriers for popular metro routes briefly soared to many times their usual levels, turning essential travel into a luxury many could not afford.
Although the government’s fare caps have acted as a brake on the most egregious examples of “opportunistic pricing,” travellers continue to report steep fares on short-notice bookings, especially on sectors hit by cancellations from more than one airline. With IndiGo scaling back select domestic and international services, SpiceJet and Akasa Air trimming frequencies on economically marginal routes, and Air India still in the midst of its own multi-year transformation, there is little surplus capacity in the system to smooth over such shocks.
That makes route choice and timing more critical than ever. Passengers who once booked late-evening flights out of convenience are now gravitating toward mid-day departures, which are statistically less vulnerable to fog-related disruption and the cascading delays that accumulate by nightfall. Others are building additional buffers into their itineraries, overnighting in hub cities like Mumbai or Delhi before onward connections to international flights, rather than relying on tight same-day turnarounds that could be wrecked by a cancellation in Guwahati or Chandigarh.
Still, many travellers lack the flexibility or resources to adapt in this way. Students travelling home from smaller cities, migrant workers commuting between metros and their home states, and families on fixed budgets are often at the mercy of whatever seats are left once cancellations are announced. For these groups, each fresh announcement of withdrawn flights across India’s key domestic corridors is more than an inconvenience; it can mean missed wages, postponed medical treatments or the loss of non-refundable bookings down the line.
How Airlines and Regulators Are Responding
Facing public frustration and political pressure, both airlines and regulators have moved to introduce measures aimed at softening the blow of repeated disruptions. IndiGo has pledged to complete all pending refunds from its December crisis and has been under regulator scrutiny to ensure timely communication with passengers when schedule changes occur. The airline has also been forced to moderate its growth plans, scaling back long-haul ambitions and rebalancing capacity with an eye toward restoring reliability rather than simply chasing market share.
Other carriers have rolled out their own mitigation tools. Air India, for example, has promoted a “FogCare” initiative that proactively alerts passengers whose flights are likely to be affected by dense fog, offering them the option to reschedule without fees or opt for full refunds. While such programmes are not universal, they signal a growing recognition that simply citing “operational reasons” and leaving passengers to fend for themselves is no longer acceptable in a market as competitive and digitally savvy as India’s.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has taken a more assertive stance, from temporarily easing crew duty rules to reduce immediate chaos to mandating greater transparency over delays and cancellations. The Ministry of Civil Aviation, meanwhile, has not hesitated to summon airline executives or introduce temporary interventions such as fare caps when disruptions threaten to spiral. At the same time, regulators are seeking to avoid creating perverse incentives or long-term distortions that might ultimately hurt competition and consumer choice.
Yet there are limits to what policy alone can achieve. Many of the root causes of disruption are infrastructural and structural in nature, including congested airports, constrained airspace and the lack of secondary hubs that could act as pressure valves when primary metros are saturated. As domestic traffic continues to climb, Indian aviation will need sustained investment and careful coordination between airlines, airport operators and regulators if the current cycle of crisis and patchwork cure is to be broken.
What Travellers Can Do Now
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, Indian domestic travellers are having to become more strategic. Industry experts recommend booking as early as possible on critical journeys, particularly for routes involving airports prone to winter fog such as Chandigarh and Delhi, or those reliant on a single dominant carrier. Where budgets and schedules permit, choosing morning or mid-day departures, allowing generous connection windows and avoiding tight same-day international links from cities like Chennai or Kolkata can significantly reduce the risk of a single cancellation derailing an entire trip.
Staying informed in real time has also become essential. Airlines increasingly push updates via mobile apps, text messages and social media, but systems can be overwhelmed during major disruptions. Savvy passengers cross-check airline notifications with live flight-tracking tools and airport information displays, and those already at the airport are learning to seek out airline staff early to secure rebooking options before seats disappear. Keeping digital copies of bookings, receipts and correspondence can also smooth the path to refunds or compensation later.
Flexibility remains a powerful asset. Travellers willing to accept alternate routings, say, via Bengaluru instead of Mumbai or Kolkata instead of Delhi, may find more options when primary links are oversubscribed. In some cases, especially over relatively shorter distances between major cities, trains can offer a viable fallback when airfares spike or flights are repeatedly scrubbed. The government has at times mobilised additional rail capacity during severe aviation disruptions, recognising rail’s role as a critical backup for mass mobility.
Ultimately, however, these are coping strategies rather than solutions. As long as India’s aviation system is operating near the edge of its capacity, with little margin for error and a reliance on a handful of dominant players, passengers will remain vulnerable to the domino effects of cancellations, whether triggered by fog in Chandigarh, scheduling missteps in Gurugram, or airspace restrictions over the northern skies.
The Road Ahead for India’s Skies
India’s air travel story over the past decade has been one of rapid expansion, democratization of access and intense competition, with low-cost carriers like IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa Air playing starring roles. The current wave of disruptions does not reverse that trajectory, but it does highlight the growing pains of a sector that has raced ahead faster than some of its supporting structures. Each new cancellation notice on a route linking Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati or Chandigarh is a reminder that growth without resilience can leave both airlines and passengers exposed.
In the near term, flyers can expect an environment where schedules are somewhat more conservative, fares remain elevated during peak periods, and airlines are more cautious about launching or reinstating marginal routes. IndiGo’s decision to pare back international ambitions to focus on core operations, and other carriers’ moves to rationalise networks, suggest a recalibration phase rather than an all-out retreat. For passengers, that may translate into fewer frequencies but hopefully better odds that the flights advertised will actually operate.
Longer term, the solution will depend on a blend of regulatory discipline, infrastructural expansion and smarter operational planning. New airports and terminals, modernised air traffic management, and a deeper pool of trained pilots and technicians are all on the agenda. But they will take time to materialise. Until then, the reality for travellers is a domestic network where short-notice cancellations and rapidly fluctuating fares remain part of the landscape, especially in periods of stress like winter fog season or during major regulatory shifts.
For now, as IndiGo, Akasa Air, SpiceJet and their peers navigate choppy air, Indian travellers are learning to build more resilience into their own plans. The hope is that in the coming years, the country’s aviation infrastructure and operational practices will catch up with its soaring demand, so that a cancelled flight between Chandigarh and Chennai, or a thinned schedule out of Guwahati, becomes a rare exception rather than a recurring headline.