The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has announced temporary relaxations for pilot flight duty time limitation for long haul journeys.
The relaxations are valid till the end of April, Asangba Chuba Ao, Joint Secretary, Civil Aviation said in a press briefing on Tuesday.
The move comes as the Aviation watchdog strives to ensure pilot availability for smooth operations in an increasingly vulnerable air space, on account of the on-going Iran war.
DGCA's decision is notable in light of what happened with IndiGo in December 2025, when operations for India's largest airline had nearly collapsed under the weight of FDTL norms.
Failure to conform to crew-rostering rules, in turn, triggered widespread flight disruptions and left lakhs of travellers stranded at airports across the country.
At the centre of the crisis were regulations requiring pilots and cabin crew to get more rest, including 48-hour weekly breaks instead of 36 hours earlier and stricter limits on night landings.
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The airline was accused of failing to make arrangements to comply with the new rules. As a result, IndiGo was left short of crew, forcing it to ground more than half its fleet.
The norms were introduced last year by DGCA to deal with pilot fatigue and reduce the amount of time pilots can fly in a week.
Union Minister Murlidhar Mohol in his address in the Rajya Sabha had said that the primary triggers for the IndiGo disruption were over-optimisation of operations, inadequate regulatory preparedness along with deficiencies in system software support and shortcomings in management structure and operational control on the part of the airline.
The temporary relaxations will apply to long-haul flights operated with two pilots. Apart from this, DGCA has also extended the Flight Time (FT) by 1.30 hours to 11.30 hours and the Flight Duty Period (FDP) by 1.45 hours to 11.45 hours.
FT refers to the total time starting from the moment an aeroplane first moves for the purpose of taking off until the moment it finally comes to rest at the end of the flight.
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