SpiceJet and Air India Express faced lengthy flight delays today across several routes.
A SpiceJet flight from Kochi was delayed by nearly 14 hours, with departure moved to the following day, while a SpiceJet flight from Jaipur was delayed almost 12 hours.
Air India Express flights from Amritsar and Kochi were delayed by close to 12 hours and over two hours respectively.
An Air India flight from New Delhi was delayed by around 1.5 hours as part of the same disruption.
The delays follow a wider wave of Asian aviation disruption on September 11 and 12, which saw 4,804 flights delayed and 206 cancelled, with Delhi’s IGI Airport logging 475 delayed departures.
The delays come days after a separate wave of disruption swept Asian aviation hubs on September 11 and 12, when 4,804 flights were delayed and 206 cancelled across the region.
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.
SpiceJet aircraft landing in New Delhi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
