The move comes in the wake of widespread flight disruptions in December 2025, when the airline had to cancel more than 5,000 flights in seven days after facing an acute crew shortage. The crisis followed the implementation of revised standards for pilot duty and rest by the civil aviation regulator.
According to the announcement on the company’s website, the new recruitment will include first officers in training, senior first officers and captains. One of the recruitment announcements also states that the airline is open to recruiting pilots without prior experience of the Airbus A320, the main aircraft type in its fleet.
Control after the flight crisis
The disruption was due to new rest rules introduced by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The rules limited the number of landings a pilot can make between midnight and 6 a.m. and tightened weekly rest requirements.
An investigation by the regulator found that IndiGo had not sufficiently scaled up hiring or expedited training to align with the new standards. As a result, pilots became scarcer, with frequent redeployments, longer duty hours and longer ‘deadheading’, where crew members travel as passengers to operate flights from another location.
The DGCA’s investigation found what it described as an overriding focus on “maximizing the use of crew, aircraft and network resources,” which significantly reduced schedule buffer margins. Crew schedules were structured to maximize duty periods, with heavy reliance on tail changes, extended duty patterns and minimal recovery time. According to the regulator, this compromised the integrity of the schedules and weakened operational resilience.
The study found that while IndiGo needed 2,422 captains to operate its schedule, the number was 2,357 at the time. However, following the crisis, DGCA granted temporary exemptions from night service restrictions until February 10 to ease immediate operational pressure.
Expanding the training pipeline
The report quoted a senior official as saying the airline is now proactively building a pipeline of pilots to match its rapid aircraft introduction plan. IndiGo introduces about four new aircraft every month and requires steady crew expansion to maintain high load factors.
While the DGCA mandates three sets of pilots per aircraft, including one captain and one first officer in each set, IndiGo’s high aircraft utilization means that the effective requirement is more than double the baseline.
In addition to hiring, the airline is restructuring its network to introduce larger operational buffers. The schedule buffers, which were negligible in December, were increased to 3 percent in February. The level of standby crew has also been increased to a minimum of 15 percent.
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