It was October 1988. Me, my mother, and my younger sister were supposed to fly in an Indian Airlines flight, from Ranchi, in what was then Bihar, to Srinagar, in Jammu and Kashmir, with an overnight stop at Delhi, to attend my father’s younger brother’s wedding.

Ranchi – airport code IXR – had only one daily Indian Airlines flight to Delhi. And Indian Airlines was the only airline flying out of IXR.

The flight got cancelled. And all hell broke loose.

Would we get accommodated on the next day’s flight? There were no guarantees, given that there were passengers already booked to fly.

Would we manage to get train tickets to Delhi? Perhaps. But then how would we get from Delhi to Srinagar? Well, Jammu to Srinagar was really not a problem because buses and cabs operated through the day – of course, as long as the highway was operational.

But what about Delhi to Jammu? Would train tickets be available? No guarantees again, given that the route was always so busy.

How about just staying put in Ranchi? And not attending the wedding? Nah. That wasn’t going to happen.

So, the next day, my mother, me and my younger sister, were back at the airport again. The suspense was almost killing. Sometime before the flight was supposed to take off, a man, who looked like an important official at the airport, came looking for my mother. (Yeah it was possible, we were still in the 1980s.)

My mother wasn’t around. She had perhaps gone to use the toilet. And at that moment, I was like, there go our tickets to Delhi: “He is going to offer it to someone else.” But within seconds Ma was back to rescue the day: the official told her that someone hadn’t turned up, and that we were on the flight to Delhi.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that lone episode remains my only cancelled flight. It was more than 37 years ago. And watching the reels, the memes, and the breathless news reports on the mayhem unleashed by Indigo’s thousands of cancellations over the past few days, I can’t help thinking: boy, have I been lucky, or what.

Weddings have been missed. Holidays have been cancelled. A couple even attended their own wedding reception online. Waiting for their flights to take off, people have danced the garba at the airport. Uncles and aunties have lost their cool and shouted and raged at the hapless Indigo staff manning the counters, who really don’t have an airplane tucked in their pockets. Social media warriors have written long threads to explain the chaos. The ‘free-market’ has sent the airfares soaring. The gated-community wallahs – who in almost every discussion like to point out that they are the ones paying the taxes that run the nation – have had to bear the brunt of these cancellations – and in a period of brief brain fade some of them have been ready to launch a revolution. Okay, the last one is a lie.

In October 1988, Indian Airlines carried almost every passenger within India. (I know, I know, there was Vayudoot too…). In October 2025, Indigo carried two out of three passengers flying domestically. (Okay, to be precise, Indigo has 65.6% market share).

Much has changed in the last four decades. Indian airports were basic functional entities in the 1980s. To be honest they looked more like shaadi halls. Now, they are everything from an art gallery to a shopping mall. The flyers had no choice in the 1980s. Now, there is a lot of choice – what time and day to take a flight, how much to pay, and even which airline to fly with.

Well, the part about which airline to fly with, isn’t really totally true. If a single airline is flying two out of every three passengers, it isn’t much of a choice, though it might seem like one. Indeed, in some of the smaller cities, this statistic is even more in favour of Indigo.

Combine the Air India group’s numbers with Indigo’s, and you get this: nine in ten passengers, on average, fly with one of the two. Akasa Air, the almost defunct SpiceJet, and a few others, carry the remaining.

Clearly, the Indian domestic airline sector is what economists would like to call a duopoly, with two main players. But it’s a duopoly which smells like a monopoly – that of Indigo.

In October 2014, Indigo flew around one out of three domestic passengers, on average. But Air India, Jet Airways, and SpiceJet, had a substantial market share as well. Air India flew around one in five domestic passengers, whereas Jet Airways and SpiceJet, flew around one in six. Go Air was also around on the margins. There was some competition amongst airlines.

So, what changed?

Economists love to talk about the free market with many different firms competing for the business that is on offer. There is nothing wrong with that. But what happens after the competition gets going, is something that almost no one talks about.

Competition destroys competition: all firms in the market do not operate at the same level of efficiency, and hence, some get left out. Of course, I am speaking in slightly simplistic terms here to make a broader point.

If we compare the situation between 2014 and now, Jet Airways and Go Air have shut down, and SpiceJet has more or less shut down – given that it has just a 2.6% market share. The only largish new airline that has been launched in this period is Akasa Air, and it currently flies around one in every twenty passengers domestically.

Further, in 2014, Air India, was a loss-making government owned entity. If it was a private airline back then, it would have probably shut down by now. Thankfully, the Tata Group, due to long-simmering emotional reasons, decided to buy it, and ensured that the government doesn’t continue to lose money on running an airline.

Before these airlines, other big airlines like Kingfisher and Sahara, also had to shut down, primarily due to the vanity of their owners.

In all this, Indigo has prospered, and captured the market share vacated by the airlines that have gone kaput or simply shrunk. And airlines are a difficult business to be in. They destroy capital faster than you can say Jack Robinson. They can make millionaires out of billionaires. Indeed, they are an antithesis to that much abused management jargon of durable competitive advantage.

And Indigo has survived all this and more – getting people from point A to point B, usually on time, a parameter that matters most to regular travellers. But along the way, it more or less became a monopoly, and with that came hubris.

Before the current chaos, almost every day, someone would share their horror story of dealing and flying with Indigo, on social media. But that had almost no impact on their market share, because there is simply no choice, even for those looking to change.

The trouble with hubris is that it leads to indifference. And this deadly combination has led to the current chaos.

Why the chaos?

In May 2024, after having wide ranging consultations with the airlines, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) – India’s civil aviation regulator – released new rules. These new rules – which are in line with global standards – at a simple level allow pilots and cabin crew to take longer breaks between their regular flying schedule.

The airlines had time until November 2025 to comply. Reportedly, every other airline did that. Indigo, didn’t.

In fact, the idea is simple: tired pilots are unsafe, so the rules ensure they get enough sleep and breaks. If an airline’s schedule pushes crew beyond these limits, the crew cannot legally fly, and flights may get delayed or cancelled. Which is what has been happening over the last few days.

Indigo needed to recruit more pilots to comply with the new rules. It clearly hasn’t. Why? As mentioned earlier, with hubris comes indifference: The thinking within the organisation probably was that rules are not something that a monopoly needs to comply with. It makes its own rules. The spate of cancellations leave us with no other reasonable explanation.

Now, before the pandemic set in, employee costs made up for around 11% of Indigo’s expenses. Post the pandemic, up until the financial year ending March 2025, it has been at 8%. From April to September 2025 – the first six months of the current financial year – it has been at 9.4%. This is higher than the post pandemic 8%, but it’s still lower than 11%.

What does this imply? The finance department has been overruling the operations department and the risk department to squeeze out a few percentage points into the operating profit, by getting the pilots and the cabin crew to work more. And clearly they have been caught out in the process.

Further, it’s amazing that the civil aviation regulator was asleep all this while. The fact that Indigo hadn’t recruited enough pilots is something they should have clearly known. And now that the chaos has been unleashed, the regulator has put in abeyance the new rules which allowed more breaks to the pilots.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say this is precisely what Indigo was perhaps banking on. All hell would break loose, and the regulator would then relax the rules.

So, where does that leave us?

The basic problem still remains. Indigo has too much control of the domestic aviation market. A problem that can only be solved if more serious private players get into the business. But that as we know hasn’t really happened in the last decade.

Indian firms haven’t been in the mood to take on too much risk. Plus airlines are a fairly operational sort of business, not the sexy kind where apps can be built, with venture capital money, and shares can then be sold to retail investors, at fairly expensive prices through initial public offerings. 

Indeed, the problem of monopoly of Indigo can only be solved if a few entrepreneurs decide to take up the risk of starting new airlines. We have reached a stage where a new set of competitors need to come in and take on Indigo’s monopoly. But that’s easier said than done.

In the end, Indigo isn’t suffering from bad luck; it’s suffering from good fortune. When you control two-thirds of the market, you start believing gravity doesn’t apply to you – or the DGCA, or the laws of arithmetic, or the number of pilots needed to actually fly planes.

And because no one else wants to burn thousands of crores learning how to run an airline, Indigo has had the sky mostly to itself. Which is why we now have thousands of cancellations and one airline that thinks it can write its own rulebook.

Monopoly, or duopoly if you want to call it that, after all, is the perfect fuel for mayhem. Of course, the gated community wallahs, living their lives in cocoons built around WhatsApp forwards, stock market gains, conversations around this year we did Turkey-next year we’ll do New Zealand, tu jaanta nahi hai mera baap koun hai, and filtered air, think that’s only true for business.

Vivek Kaul is an economic commentator and a writer.