'Nothing happened overnight': IndiGo employee's open letter makes big revelations

As IndiGo airline scrambles to get to normalcy after thousands of flights being cancelled, an open letter from an employee throws light on the company’s current situation. The whistleblower calls it a systematic failure that was waiting to happen for years, and says ‘nothing happened overnight; we all saw it coming’. The letter further emphasised how those flagging issues to management were made to face “humiliation”.

“We started off small in 2006. We were proud, genuinely proud, of what we were building. But somewhere along the way, pride turned into arrogance, and growth turned into greed. The attitude became: ‘we are too big to fail.’ Remember this phrase, yes we heard this in 2009 when Lehman Brothers and likes failed. And we, the employees, kept warning— sometimes quietly, sometimes desperately. But no one listened,” the letter speaks of every situation the employees went through with the company as it was soaring, but as they experienced unforeseen situations, the airline chose to pay no heed.

An airline which earlier referred to the flyers as “passengers” has now taken a conscious call to address them as “customers”. This indicates the shift in the attitude of the company towards people choosing their airline.

Pointing at the incompetence of employees in positions of authority, the letter stated, “The real rot started when titles became more important than talent. Suddenly, people who couldn’t even draft a proper email were becoming VPs—because being a VP meant access to ESOPs and power. And how do you justify that power? By squeezing the employees under you. Pilots raised concerns about fatigue and unsafe duty timings.”

“Instead of being heard, some were called to the head office, intimidated, shouted at, and humiliated. No consequences. No accountability. Just fear. When night duties were doubled, when new rules were implemented, when leaves were taken away—not a single extra rupee was added to compensate for the physical and mental toll,” it added.