New Delhi: The real rot at the domestic carrier IndiGo started when positions prevailed over talent and somewhere along the way, pride turned into arrogance and growth turned into greed, an open letter purportedly from an anonymous IndiGo employee has claimed.
In the letter, authenticity of which could not established, the anonymous employee has named IndiGo top brass, including its chief executive officer (CEO) Pieter Elbers, chief operating officer (COO) and accountable manager Isidro Porquerus, senior vice-president for operations command centre Jason Herter and senior VP for flight operations Ashim Mittra, among others, as those responsible for the current mess within the airline.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Saturday served show cause notices to both Elbers and Porquerus, saying the large-scale operational failures indicate significant lapses in planning, oversight and resource management.
“… as the CEO, you are responsible for ensuring effective management of the airline but you have failed in your duty to ensure timely arrangements for conduct of reliable operations and the availability of requisite facilities to the passengers,” the DGCA said in its notice to Elbers.
The aviation regulator has asked Elbers and Porqueras to reply within 24 hours. The airline has requested DGCA till 6pm on Monday to respond to the notice. The regulator granted it a one-time extension.
The notices cited non-provisioning of adequate arrangements to cater to the revised requirements for smooth implementation of the approved FDTL (Flight Duty Time Limitations) scheme for the airline as the primary cause of the ongoing flight disruptions.
In the open letter, addressed to fellow citizens and the IndiGo management, the anonymous employee said that the airline’s internal issue isno longerjust an internal affair but “affects millions of people in this country.”
“I am writing this not as a spokesperson, not as someone hiding behind corporate language, but as an IndiGo employee who has lived through every shift, every sleepless night, every humiliation, every squeezed pay cheque, and every impossible roster,” the letter said. “Nothing happened overnight — We All Saw It Coming IndiGo didn’t collapse in a day. This downfall was years in the making.”
The letter claimed that when the airline started off small in 2006, everyone was “genuinely proud of what we were building. But somewhere along the way, pride turned into arrogance, and growth turned into greed.”
“The attitude became: “We are too big to fail.” And we, the employees, kept warning— sometimes quietly, sometimes desperately. But no one listened,” it added.
Meanwhile, the country kept calling IndiGo the “free market success story,” even as it “strangled competition” route by route, the anonymous letter said and alleged that the airline “hounded Akasa Air” on its launch by deploying over capacity. “…they did that in part with every other airline,” the letter claimed.
“Everyone saw it—passengers, employees, the government. But we all looked away and now we blame this to monopoly. What We Faced Inside — And What No One Talks About The real rot started when titles became more important than talent,” it claimed, adding: “Suddenly, people who couldn’t even draft a proper email were becoming VPs—because being a VP meant access to ESOPs and power. And how do you justify that power? By squeezing the employees under you.”
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