The cascading impact of IndiGo’s crew-roster crisis was acutely felt at Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport on 7 December, where 69 flights—38 departures and 31 arrivals—were cancelled by 18:00. Another 17 services suffered long delays, including the late-night Ahmedabad–Jeddah sector, forcing several Umrah passengers to miss onward connections in Saudi Arabia.
Airport operator Adani Airports deployed extra seating at curbside zones, opened two makeshift help-desks outside Terminal 1 and coordinated with CISF security to manage swelling crowds. Nonetheless, queues for refunds and rerouting snaked into parking bays, and last-minute walk-up fares on rival carriers trebled on sectors such as Ahmedabad–Delhi (₹21,000 plus). Ground staff earned praise for assisting an elderly cancer patient who missed her Jammu flight, illustrating the human-impact dimension of systemic disruption.
![Chaotic scenes at Ahmedabad as 69 IndiGo flights scrapped in a day, ripple hits international connectors]()
For inbound mobility managers the episode is a warning that domestic ‘last-mile’ sectors remain a single point of failure for expatriates and assignees entering India via Mumbai or Delhi and relying on tight connections to Gujarat’s manufacturing hub. Companies should build four-to-six-hour buffers between international arrival and domestic continuation during the month-long recovery window.
Logistics teams with expatriate engineers heading to Sanand’s EV corridor are arranging charter buses and, where feasible, shifting travel from Ahmedabad to Vadodara or Rajkot. Travel-risk policies should be updated to include minimum ground-transfer times and emergency accommodation allowances during Tier-II airport disruptions.
Industry analysts say IndiGo normally carries 42 % of Ahmedabad’s daily seats; even a partial outage strains capacity because the next-largest carrier, Air India, runs a thin schedule. Until normalcy returns, corporates may consider routing via Mumbai and using fast inter-city trains such as the Vande Bharat Express as a fallback.
Airport operator Adani Airports deployed extra seating at curbside zones, opened two makeshift help-desks outside Terminal 1 and coordinated with CISF security to manage swelling crowds. Nonetheless, queues for refunds and rerouting snaked into parking bays, and last-minute walk-up fares on rival carriers trebled on sectors such as Ahmedabad–Delhi (₹21,000 plus). Ground staff earned praise for assisting an elderly cancer patient who missed her Jammu flight, illustrating the human-impact dimension of systemic disruption.
For inbound mobility managers the episode is a warning that domestic ‘last-mile’ sectors remain a single point of failure for expatriates and assignees entering India via Mumbai or Delhi and relying on tight connections to Gujarat’s manufacturing hub. Companies should build four-to-six-hour buffers between international arrival and domestic continuation during the month-long recovery window.
Logistics teams with expatriate engineers heading to Sanand’s EV corridor are arranging charter buses and, where feasible, shifting travel from Ahmedabad to Vadodara or Rajkot. Travel-risk policies should be updated to include minimum ground-transfer times and emergency accommodation allowances during Tier-II airport disruptions.
Industry analysts say IndiGo normally carries 42 % of Ahmedabad’s daily seats; even a partial outage strains capacity because the next-largest carrier, Air India, runs a thin schedule. Until normalcy returns, corporates may consider routing via Mumbai and using fast inter-city trains such as the Vande Bharat Express as a fallback.
