Airline Operations at Delhi Airport Gradually Returning to Normal After ATC Glitch
New Delhi: Flight operations at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), the country’s busiest, began returning to normal on Saturday morning, following a major disruption caused by a technical glitch in the air traffic control system that delayed over 800 flights on Friday.
The issue, which affected the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) — a critical component of the Air Traffic Control’s (ATC) flight planning process — persisted for more than 15 hours from around 5:45 a.m. on Friday. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) confirmed around 9 p.m. that the problem had been resolved.
IGIA, which operates four runways and handles more than 1,500 flight movements daily, faced significant delays and a few cancellations as a result of the outage. Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) said on Saturday that the situation was improving steadily.
“Airline operations at Delhi Airport are returning to normal, and all concerned authorities are working diligently to minimise any inconvenience caused,” DIAL said in a post on X.
According to flight-tracking website Flightradar24, over 200 flights were still delayed — both arrivals and departures — on Saturday morning. It was not immediately clear if these delays were entirely due to residual issues with the AMSS.
IndiGo, India’s largest airline, said that the airport operator and ATC teams were “working on priority to fully restore systems and stabilise operations,” adding that “the situation is expected to normalise over the next few hours.”
Sources said the AMSS began facing problems late Thursday, with a full outage occurring early Friday morning, forcing controllers to manually prepare flight plans — a slow and complex process.
The AAI said it had deployed additional staff to manually process flight plans to ensure safe operations during the disruption.
In a statement on Friday evening, the AAI confirmed that the issue in the IP-based AMSS had been fixed. “The OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) was engaged, and additional staff were deployed to manually process flight plans to ensure uninterrupted and safe air traffic operations,” it said.
AAI added that a joint team of ECIL officials and AAI personnel remains on-site to monitor system performance. “The AMSS systems are up and functional now. Due to some backlogs, there may still be minor delays, but the situation will normalise soon,” it said.
