Indonesia's Garuda Warns of More Chaos

Despite two days of chaos with Garuda Indonesia’s flight scheduling and hundreds of stranded passengers, the flag carrier says it will not be able to return to normal operations until Thursday.

As many as 737 passengers from six flights had to spend Sunday night in hotels, at a cost to Garuda of Rp 240 million ($27,000), as a result of a crew rotation system malfunction.

On Monday, four flights were canceled, to Medan, Palembang, Pangkal Pinang and Yogyakarta, but all passengers were transferred to other flights.

The airline warned that 13 flights would be canceled today, but said all passengers would be booked onto alternative flights.

“We have already informed passengers that 13 flights — one to Kuala Lumpur, two to Medan, four to Palembang, three to Semarang, one to Makassar and two to Surabaya — have been canceled,” said Agus Priyanto, Garuda’s director of commercial operations.


Garuda said the problems were caused by the loss of crew rotation data during the switch-over to a new operations system.

Crew rotation is one of three components, along with aircraft rotation and flight dispatch, handled by the new $1.5 million Integrated Operation Control System.

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