IndiGo built India's biggest airline by ordering Airbus jets in bulk
In June 2023 an Indian budget airline placed an order for 500 Airbus jets, the largest aircraft order in commercial aviation history. It was IndiGo's third record-breaking Airbus deal in eight years. The carrier that began with a single flight from Delhi in 2006 now handles nearly two-thirds of India's domestic passengers.
IndiGo was founded in 2005 by Rahul Bhatia of InterGlobe Enterprises and Rakesh Gangwal, an Indian expatriate based in the United States. Before flying a single passenger it ordered 100 A320s. The first plane arrived in July 2006 and the first service, Delhi to Imphal via Guwahati, took off on 4 August. By 2012 it had overtaken Jet Airways to become India's largest airline, six years after launch.
The formula is ruthless simplicity. It flies essentially one family of aircraft in similar layouts, which keeps training and maintenance cheap, and buys in bulk to cut the price of each jet. Planes are turned around in about 20 minutes so they can fly roughly 12 hours a day, and check-in staff double as baggage handlers. Even the logo is spare: twenty dots arranged in the shape of an aircraft.
The growth has been relentless. Rules required five years of domestic flying before it could go abroad, so its first international route, New Delhi to Dubai, opened only in September 2011; business class seats followed on a handful of flights in 2024. It crossed 100 million passengers in total in 2015, then in 2023 became the first Indian airline to carry over 100 million in a single calendar year. It now runs more than 2,700 daily flights to 137 destinations and holds the world's largest fleet of A321neos.
Scale brought fragility. In December 2025, after failing to adapt to new crew rest rules from India's aviation regulator, IndiGo cancelled nearly 4,500 flights in ten days. Chief executive Pieter Elbers resigned in March 2026, and in August the former IATA director general Willie Walsh took over as chief executive.
Source: IndiGo
