Air travel limped back to normalcy with the restoration of airline and airport IT systems early Saturday.
Friday had witnessed cancellations of around 270 domestic departures and punctuality of 30-67 per cent as airlines restored to manual check-in processes. While IndiGo cancelled flights for the second day, largely as a cascading effect, those were far fewer than disruption on Friday.
Akasa Air and SpiceJet said they didn't cancel a single flight on Friday. The two airlines, however, reported on-time performance (OTP) of 30-33 per cent, while IndiGo had only 40 per cent of its flights on time on Friday. Air India and Vistara reported better OTP of 55 per cent and 67 per cent, possibly due to lesser reliance on impacted systems.
"Since 3 am airline systems across airports have started functioning normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now. There is a backlog of disruptions yesterday and it is getting cleared gradually....We are constantly monitoring operations at our airports and also with airlines to ensure that travel adjustments and refunds are taken care of," civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said in an X post.
"We are diligently working to resume normal operations and we expect this process to extend into the weekend," IndiGo said.
IndiGo offered vouchers to passengers who volunteered to reschedule their trips because of flight overbooking and also gave refunds. It said that Friday’s outage had impacted its booking system, which has been restored.
However, some passengers complained of communication delays. What is the point of messaging a passenger at 9 a.m. for a 12 p.m. departure? By that time, people have already travelled to the airport,” said a passenger travelling from Mumbai to Chennai.