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Flight Ticket Will Cost 2× More

Hey there, if you have opened Indigo or Air India’s app lately and felt your heart skip a beat at the prices, you are not imagining things.

Flights in India are becoming increasingly expensive, and it is not just due to fuel or the festive season surge.

Something much bigger is happening behind the scenes.

Today, I am pulling back the curtain on how one emotional takeover, one set of “safety” rules, and one massive pilot shortage are quietly pushing India toward an expensive aviation duopoly, and why the middle-class flyer is going to pay the heaviest price.

Homecoming That Turned Into A Financial Nightmare

In 2022, Tata brought Air India back into the family after a 69-year absence.

It felt like poetry, the group that J.R.D. Tata, founded in 1932, was finally coming home.

They paid ₹18,000 crore, promised a world-class airline, and placed the most significant aircraft order in Indian history (470 new jets).

Three years in, the balance sheet tells a different story:

FY 2024-25 combined operating loss (Air India + Air India Express): ₹10,975–11,200 crore
That is more than double the loss of the previous year
Daily cash burn: roughly ₹30 crore

Even for a conglomerate as strong as Tata, that kind of bleeding cannot continue indefinitely.

Airline That Made Flying Affordable For 300 Million Indians

While Air India struggled, IndiGo became the hero of India’s middle class.

Their recipe was ruthless but straightforward:

Fly only one aircraft family (A320) → huge savings on training and spares
Keep planes in the air 12–14 hours a day
Run hundreds of money-saving red-eye flights when airports are almost free
Result: 63% domestic market share with ticket prices that actually made sense

A round-trip Delhi–Mumbai for ₹6,000–₹8,000 used to be normal because IndiGo forced everyone else to match or disappear (ask the ghosts of Jet Airways and Go First).

Then The FDTL Bomb That Changed Everything

In January 2024, the DGCA introduced new Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) rules, marketed as a safety enhancement.

The headlines sounded great:

48 hours of compulsory weekly rest (highest in the world)
Only 2 night landings per pilot per week (lowest in the world)
Night window stretched from midnight to 6 AM
Weekly flying hours slashed to ~35 (international norm is 60)

One month after the final phase began (November 2025), reality hit.

A flight scheduled to land at 11:55 PM gets delayed by 10 minutes

Lands at 12:05 AM
Suddenly, it counts as a “night landing.” The crew waiting to fly the aircraft onward has already done their 2 allowed night landings for the week
Legally grounded. No standby crew
Flight cancelled
Aircraft stuck
Next city’s rotation collapses.

December 2025: IndiGo cancelled over 2,000 flights in ten days.

On-time performance crashed below 40%.

The entire country felt it.

Same Rules, Completely Different Pain

Here is the part most news stories conveniently skip:

Airline	Market	Pilots	Match
IndiGo	63%	5,463	~16,500–17,000
Air India Group	27–28%	5,449	Already there

IndiGo was doing more than twice the work with the same number of pilots.

The new rules reward inefficiency.

Air India barely flinched; they already had spare crews sitting around. IndiGo got crushed.

Pilot Shortage Nobody Can Fix Overnight

India requires approximately 2,000–2,500 new pilots annually to sustain its growth.

We are producing less than half that number.

Experienced captains are retiring or jumping to Gulf carriers for double pay and zero tax.

Training one pilot from scratch costs ₹1–1.5 crore and takes 2½ years.

The government is now considering allowing non-science graduates to become commercial pilots by 2030; this is a sign of the desperate situation that has arisen.

Tripling IndiGo’s pilot strength in 2–3 years? Not going to happen.

Not in India, not anywhere in the world.