Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport is an international airport serving the city of Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. The airport is located at Sonegaon, 8 km South-West of Nagpur. The airport covers an area of 1355 acres. In 2005, it was named after B. R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. The airport handles around 7,500 passengers per day and caters to five domestic airlines and two international airlines connecting Nagpur to Sharjah, Doha and 11 domestic destinations. The airport spread over 1,460-acres is also home to AFS Nagpur of the Indian Air Force. Growth in passenger traffic is fueled by passengers traveling to and from the state capitalMumbai, over 700 km away. The airport has one terminal and has two aerobridges.
History
The airport was commissioned during the First World War in 1917-18 for the RFC/RAF. The old buildings were renovated during the Second World War, when it was used as a staging airfield by the Royal Air Force. It was transferred to the Indian Government when the British left. Due to brisk traffic, new terminal buildings featuring facilities of refreshment, retiring rooms, restrooms, book stalls and visitor's galleries were constructed in 1953. Sonegaon airport was the hub of the unique "Night Air Mail Service" wherein four planes left from Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras every night with a mail load from their region and returned to their home base in the early morning, after exchanging the mail at Nagpur. The service was operated from January 1949 until October 1973. Over the years its major traffic was civilian aircraft till the formation of 44 Wing and the transfer of the Il-76military transport aircraft of the IAF in 2003.
Expansion
It is slated to be the Multimodal International Hub Airport and development work started in 2005. The plan involves construction of a second runway, a new terminal building and a cargo complex through a build-operate-transfer basis. The Maharashtra government offered 400 hectares of land to the Indian Air Force in exchange of 278 hectares of land occupied by Air Force Station, Nagpur. The new Integrated Terminal Building was inaugurated on 14 April 2008. The Airports Authority of India modified and upgraded the existing building at the cost of. It covers an area of 17,500 square metres and has the capacity to handle 550 arriving and departing passengers during peak hours. The new terminal building has 20 check-in counters and 20 immigration counters. The Integrated Terminal Building is equipped with facilities such as passenger bridges with visual docking guidance system and baggage conveyor system. A car park to accommodate 600 cars at a time has been built. Eight new parking bays were added to take the number of bays to 18. For improving city-side connectivity, a new approach road to connect the terminal building with the main highway has been constructed. To improve the navigation facilities at Nagpur airport, AAI plans to construct a new control tower and technical block with all modern CNS ATM facilities.
A maintenance-repair-overhaul facility, built by the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing, occupies 50 acres of land at the airport. Construction began in January 2011. Air India's maintenance-repair-overhaul unit, called Air India Engineering Services, which was hived into a separate company in 2013, will start operating the maintenance-repair-overhaul facility by June 2015. The $100 million project is part of a deal between Air India and Boeing and has two 100 x 100-metre hangars, constructed by Larsen & Toubro, to accommodate wide-body aircraft like Boeing 777 and 787-8 and another 24,000 sq metres area for allied work. Nagpur was chosen for the project because of its central location and its high temperatures, favourable for aircraft manufacturing, as they are away from corrosion and sea water contamination. The greenfield project is Boeing's second in the world after Shanghai in China.
