The anguish over flying Indigo, or not being able to, in early December is still fresh for many. Stories of hours spent at the airport or of missed weddings will accompany any mention of the airline in conversations for months if not years. 

Some I know have even sworn never to fly Indigo. But such resolve is sure to meet the same fate as fitness goals at the start of the year. After all, Indigo carries almost two in every three passengers within the country. What’s more, of its 900 routes, it has a monopoly on over 500. 

A combination of factors, including the aviation regulator’s new rules to increase the frequency and duration of mandatory rest for pilots, software glitches, smog, and Indigo’s own lack of foresight, led to roughly 4,500 flight cancellations. The government even asked Indigo to cut its schedule by 10%, or 200 flights a day, until March. 

Indigo’s shareholders naturally panicked and have, since late November, lopped off a quarter of the airline’s market value. But anyone who said it wouldn’t be able to bounce back from the once-in-a-lifetime crisis allowed emotion to trump reason. 

A recent research note on the company helps to debunk the assertion. Elara Securities, a broker, considers Indigo’s pilot shortage “transient and resolvable in the next 2–4 quarters”. Until then, it’s not all pain for Indigo, though.

Indigo’s biggest competitor, Tata-owned Air India, is in no position to turn the former’s troubles to its advantage. 

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Air India’s fleet, which includes that of its low-cost variant, will be unchanged for a year, while Indigo will continue to add roughly 50 planes to its fleet annually. In 2025, Indigo received more Airbus planes than any other airline in the world. 

Another broker, Avendus Spark Institutional Equities, put this differently last month. 

So the possibility of erosion in Indigo’s market share is slim. (ASK, a measure of supply, stands for available seat kilometres, which is the number of available seats multiplied by distance flown.)

In the past twenty years, the number of flyers in India has surged from 15 million to over 210 million, making the country the fifth-largest aviation market, according to the International Air Transport Association.