The four FOIs whose services with the regulator have been terminated with immediate effect are Deputy Chief FOI Rishi Raj Chatterjee, Senior FOI Seema Jhamnani, and FOIs Anil Kumar Pokhriyal and Priyam Kaushik, according to the DGCA order. Questions had been raised from various quarters on the DGCA’s oversight on IndiGo following last week’s spate of flight cancellations and delays that severely impacted tens of thousands of passengers.

The DGCA regularly engages experienced pilots on contract basis as FOIs and during their service with the DGCA, they are not allowed to operate flights for airlines. The FOIs are responsible for oversight, regulation, and surveillance of airline operations in order to ensure safety and compliance with the prescribed rules and standards. FOIs are critical to the functioning of the DGCA’s Flight Standards Directorate. Including the four FOIs whose services with the regulator have been terminated, the DGCA had 17 FOIs.

The network-wide disruption faced by IndiGo—India’s largest airline with a market share of almost 65 per cent—was primarily due to the carrier’s inadequate preparation for the second phase of the new crew rest and duty norms that took effect on November 1. IndiGo was short on crew against what the new norms required, and in combination with a few other factors, this led to widespread disruption in the airline’s operations, leading to scores of flight cancellations on a daily basis since the middle of last week.

In view of the disruption, which brought India’s aviation ecosystem to its knees, pilot associations and aviation experts questioned the DGCA’s oversight on the airline and the regulator’s decision to allow an increase in flights in the airline’s winter schedule that began on October 26. The airline has now been ordered to curtail its schedule by 10 per cent. A four-member inquiry panel of the DGCA is investigating the causes of the disruption to for the regualator and the government to fix accountability and take action. IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers and a few other top officials of the airline are appearing before the committee on Friday.

Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu has blamed lapses on IndiGo’s part for the disruption and said that strict action will be taken on the basis of the inquiry report to “set an example”. He said that sufficient notice was given by the DGCA to all airlines for the implementation of the new FDTL rules.

The new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules stipulate more rest for pilots and rationalization of their flying duties — particularly late night operations — in a bid to better manage pilot fatigue, which is a key risk to aviation safety. These new norms, which were stipulated in January last year were delayed in their implementation, and took effect in two phase—from July 1 and November 1—with the second phase rollout hitting IndiGo considerably. The new norms meant that airlines either had to have more pilots to maintain their schedule, or shrink the schedule in line with the new requirements. IndiGo, however, was caught unprepared.

In review meetings, IndiGo also accepted that that the disruptions “have arisen primarily from misjudgement and planning gaps in implementing” the second phase of new FDTL rules, with the airline saying that the actual crew requirement for the new rules exceeded what it had anticipated, as per the DGCA. Given the scale of the disruption, the DGCA last week granted IndiGo a temporary one-time exemption from some night operations-related changes in the new FDTL norms for its Airbus A320 pilots. The temporary rollback, which will be in place till February 10, helped IndiGo to get its act together and stabilise operations. The DGCA also granted a few other temporary relaxations to IndiGo in a bid to ensure that flight operations remain stable.