SpiceJet aircraft landing in New Delhi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Multiple flights across Indian carriers faced delays today, with a SpiceJet service from Kochi hit hardest at nearly 14 hours.
The Kochi-origin SpiceJet flight had its departure pushed to the following day, while a SpiceJet flight from Jaipur was delayed by almost 12 hours.
Air India Express flights also faced disruption, with an Amritsar service delayed nearly 12 hours and a Kochi service delayed over two hours.
An Air India flight from New Delhi saw a shorter delay of around 1.5 hours.
The delays follow a broader Asian aviation disruption on September 11 and 12 that saw 4,804 flights delayed and 206 cancelled, with Delhi’s IGI Airport recording 475 delayed departures.
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.
Passengers travelling on affected routes were advised to check their flight status directly with airlines given the scale and unpredictability of the ongoing disruptions.
SpiceJet aircraft landing in New Delhi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
