Delhi airport suffered a major ATC systems glitch, delaying over 300 departures and 118 arrivals and stranding thousands at IGIA. Airlines issued advisories as AAI and DGCA work to restore automated flight planning.
Delhi Airport Flight Delays Cause Widespread Chaos for Travellers
A technical failure in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) support system at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) triggered widespread disruption on Friday, delaying more than 300 departures and affecting over 100 arrivals as controllers switched to manual flight-planning procedures. At 1 pm, flight-tracking service FlightRadar showed 313 departures and 118 arrivals impacted by the glitch.
The fault was traced to the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS), which feeds crucial flight-plan data to the Auto Track System (ATS). When automatic feeds stopped, ATC teams were forced to prepare flight plans manually. Officials said the issue began on Thursday afternoon and continued into Friday, causing some delays of more than 12 hours.
Thousands of passengers were left stranded or forced to wait inside terminals and onboard aircraft. Stranded travellers described chaotic scenes: families who had arrived early to drop off flyers faced overnight stays and extra expenses, while pickup passengers missed trains and other onward connections as flights failed to land on schedule.
The IT ministry ruled out a cyber attack and said the disruption resulted from a system malfunction rather than hostile activity, while the Airports Authority of India (AAI) confirmed technicians were working to bring systems back online. Aviation experts warned that even short outages in automatic messaging can cascade into major schedule disruptions at India’s busiest airport, which handles roughly 1,500 daily flight movements.
