SpiceJet and Air India Express flights were hit by significant delays today, with some passengers facing waits of up to 14 hours.
A SpiceJet flight from Kochi saw the longest delay, pushed back nearly 14 hours with departure moved to the next day, while a SpiceJet flight from Jaipur was delayed almost 12 hours.
Air India Express flights were also affected, with an Amritsar service delayed close to 12 hours and a Kochi service delayed by more than two hours.
An Air India flight departing New Delhi faced a shorter delay of around 1.5 hours.
The disruption follows a wider wave of delays across Asian airports on September 11 and 12, which saw 4,804 flights delayed and 206 cancelled, with Delhi’s IGI Airport recording 475 delayed departures.
Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport was among the worst-hit in that broader regional disruption, logging 475 delayed departures over the two-day period.
Passengers on the affected Amritsar and Jaipur flights faced waits of nearly 12 hours before departure, with some SpiceJet passengers from Kochi seeing their flight pushed to the following day.
Airlines have not issued a single unified explanation for the string of delays, with individual disruptions attributed to a mix of aircraft rotation issues, weather and downstream scheduling knock-on effects.
Air India Express operates a significant share of India’s Gulf-bound routes, including services to Muscat, Salalah and Kuwait, making its schedule reliability closely watched by frequent flyers on those corridors.
Extended delays of this length typically trigger compensation or rebooking obligations for airlines under India’s civil aviation passenger charter, depending on the specific circumstances of each flight.
The Bengaluru–Vijayawada Air India route has also seen recent delay reports, adding to a pattern of disruption across the carrier’s domestic network this month.
Ground handling and crew scheduling pressures have been cited in some recent Indian aviation disruptions, though airlines have not confirmed this as a specific cause for Saturday’s delays.
SpiceJet aircraft landing in New Delhi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
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