BENGALURU (Reuters) – India’s SpiceJet had to fly empty from Dubai as passengers were not allowed to check in due to the airline’s unpaid airport charges, The Hindu Daily reported on Thursday, marking at least the second outage this month.
This is the latest in a long list of problems for SpiceJet, which has struggled to fully restore operations despite several fundraisers over the past year.
Some of SpiceJet’s lessors took it to court to settle unpaid dues and also requested India’s aviation regulator to deregister its planes. This led to the airline’s plan being put on hold and has weighed on its results in the first quarter as well.
Indian news agency PTI reported on 2 August that some SpiceJet flights in Dubai had been canceled due to non-payment of dues, with the company citing “operational reasons” for the cancellations.
A senior official at India’s civil aviation ministry told The Hindu that they are “monitoring SpiceJet”.
SpiceJet and Dubai Airports Co did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Earlier this month, SpiceJet said it had reached a settlement with Mumbai airport over “a minor financial matter”, hours after the airport warned in a now-deleted post on social media platform X of temporary disruptions to the airline’s operations.
(Reporting by Hritam Mukherjee and Nandan Mandayam in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Sonia Cheema)