Pakistan won’t open its airspace. The Middle East is on fire. Now IndiGo and Air India are asking regulators to bend pilot fatigue laws just to keep planes in the air.
Long before the missiles started flying over West Asia, Indian airlines were already flying the long way around.
Pakistan has kept its airspace closed to Indian carriers for years — a political standoff that forces every westbound flight out of India to arc south over the Arabian Sea before turning toward the Gulf, Europe, or the Americas. It is a detour that adds time, fuel, and complexity to routes that competitors flying over Pakistan complete with ease.
For years, airlines absorbed it. The routes were inconvenient, not impossible.
Then the West Asia conflict began. And the map got considerably worse.
Two Closures, One Impossible Route
With Iranian and Iraqi airspace now restricted or actively dangerous, Indian carriers face a compounding problem that no amount of schedule juggling fully solves. The path westward — already lengthened by the Pakistan closure — now has to bend further still, skirting conflict zones that have made overflights through some of the region’s most direct corridors genuinely risky.
The result is flight durations on several international sectors stretching well past 10 hours. And 10 hours is precisely where India’s Flight Duty Time Limitation rules draw a hard line.
Under DGCA regulations, any flight exceeding 10 hours requires an augmented crew — a third pilot on board to manage fatigue on longer sectors. It is a rule built around safety science, not bureaucratic convenience, and for good reason: fatigued pilots are one of aviation’s most well-documented hazards.
The problem is that “third pilot at short notice” is not a resource Indian carriers have in abundance right now. Route changes caused by active conflict zones don’t come with weeks of warning. When an airspace closes or becomes too dangerous to transit, airlines reroute within hours — and suddenly a flight that was comfortably within limits is not.
What the Airlines Are Asking For
Both IndiGo and Air India have approached the DGCA seeking a temporary exemption from pilot duty hour norms, according to sources cited by CNBC-TV18. Neither carrier has made the request public, and the DGCA has not confirmed whether it will grant relief.
The ask is not unprecedented — regulators globally have issued temporary operational relaxations during crises, including during COVID-19 when crew availability collapsed overnight. But a fatigue-hour exemption carries a different weight than a paperwork waiver. Pilot fatigue rules exist specifically because tired crew in a cockpit is not a theoretical risk.
What the airlines appear to be arguing is that the alternative — cancelling or significantly curtailing international operations — causes its own category of harm, and that managed, monitored extensions of duty hours with appropriate safeguards are preferable to grounding flights.
The Geography of the Problem
To understand the bind, consider a flight from Delhi to London. Normally, the most efficient routing would cross Pakistan and then traverse Iran or Iraq before reaching European airspace — a well-worn corridor used by carriers across Asia, Central Asia, and the Gulf. Indian carriers, barred from Pakistan, already fly a southern detour. Now, with Iran and Iraq adding risk and restriction, that southern corridor itself becomes more congested and longer.
Similar pressures apply to routes serving destinations across the Gulf, North Africa, and Southern Europe — all of which historically routed through airspace that is now either closed or operationally compromised.
Flight durations that once sat comfortably at 8–9 hours are creeping toward 11–12. That is not a minor scheduling inconvenience. That is a structural problem for crew rostering, fuel planning, and regulatory compliance simultaneously.
The Broader Cost
The pilot duty issue is the regulatory flashpoint, but the operational costs run deeper. Longer routes mean more fuel burned per flight — a serious concern when jet fuel prices are already elevated by an oil market rattled by the same conflict causing the reroutes. Crew scheduling complexity increases. Turnaround times lengthen. Aircraft utilisation — the metric airlines live and die by — falls.
For IndiGo, which operates one of the world’s largest and most tightly run low-cost networks, any sustained increase in per-flight operating cost is felt acutely. For Air India, in the middle of a multi-year transformation effort, the timing adds operational drag to an already demanding rebuild.
Neither airline can simply pass the entire cost to passengers without consequence in a competitive market. And neither can absorb it indefinitely.
What Happens Next
The DGCA now faces a genuinely difficult call. Granting the exemption risks normalising flexibility on rules that exist for hard safety reasons. Denying it could force cancellations on routes Indian carriers have fought to build — handing Gulf carriers and European airlines a competitive advantage at a moment when Indian aviation’s international ambitions are at their highest in decades.
A time-limited, tightly monitored exemption with enhanced fatigue reporting requirements is probably the most likely middle path — but that is speculation until the regulator speaks.
What is not speculation is the underlying problem. India’s airlines are caught between a years-old political standoff with Pakistan and a weeks-old military conflict reshaping the Middle East. Neither looks like it resolves soon. And every day both persist, the map for Indian carriers flying west gets a little harder to navigate.