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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been flying around India with Indigo, which is their largest low-cost airline, although I don’t intend to review the airline, I thought it would be interesting to write about a few key things I encountered while flying with them, in no particular order. Let’s dive in.
In This Post
Airline:
Indigo is India’s largest low-cost airline and biggest airline in terms of carrying passengers. Today, they operate a fleet of over 300 aircraft plus 500 Airbus A320neo and A321neo, which are on order and will join the fleet between 2030 and 2035, plus 100 A350-900 on order. That’s a lot. Compared to some of the UK’s low-cost airlines like Easy Jet, Ireland’s Ryanair, and Hungary’s Wizz Air, these are small airlines compared to them.
Flying:
I can only speak for some routes; however, my journeys, the take-offs and landings, were smooth as butter. Let me also explain why I’m saying this. It’s no secret that India can suffer severe weather changes from extreme heat to colder areas. Add in monsoon seasons and heavy fog, basically whatever kind of weather you can think of India has, which translates into pilot skills; the pilots need to know how to handle the aircraft once it switches from its autopilot to manual flying, however, when it came to that the flying was just so incredibly, well, smooth that you couldn’t even tell when you took off or when you landed.
Timing:
The primary isn’t something to boast about. However, the secondary is great, let me explain if you have ever been to India, you know what I’m talking about people are constantly pushing everywhere on the streets or indoors, that behaviour unfortunately also happens in the airport which isn’t good however because people do that, that means that boarding is pretty much always on time I would even go as far as saying that the people are more on time than the airline is.
But:
Here the but… when it comes to safety, I’ve seen things which I’m sorry to say were just unactable; on one of my flights, there was this young couple with two young kids, they couldn’t have been more than 4-6 years old, they weren’t even strapped to their seats, they were literally walking up and down the aisle whilst the plane took off yes you read that right, the stewardesses on the plane all they did was call them out on the loudspeaker, but that was it, and when I looked around I’ve seen just how blasé everyone was.
Cancellation:
Indigo is also known for cancelling flights for some reason; looking at my flight, for example, I had a flight booked from Amritsar to Delhi with them, which got cancelled; looking on Flightradar24 for the day before, I noticed that the same flight the same time the day before got cancelled too, when I asked someone about it he said that Indigo cancelling flights are a regular occurrence now I don’t actually know the reason behind it as to why they cancelled it. Still, I thought that was strange since the weather was nice, so I know that wasn’t the problem. I didn’t even get an email from them saying they would cancel it, so there’s much room for improvement.
Conclusion:
It was lovely to experience a low-cost airline in a different part of the world. That said, I’ve always been a massive fan of Indigo. They are an airline with big plans for the future, even looking to expand to major international routes with wide-body aircraft, and that’s definitely something I would love to see in the future here in the UK and Europe.
