There are 25 airports in the country that do not have night landing facilities. Kushinagar Airport, Shimla Airport and the recently inaugurated Deoghar Airport in Jharkhand are on the list of 25 airports.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation told the Rajya Sabha on Monday that airport upgrades or modernization, including the provision of night landing facilities, is an ongoing process and is carried out by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and other airport operators from time to time. time depends on land availability, commercial feasibility, socio-economic considerations, traffic demand and airline’s willingness to operate to/from this airport, etc.
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“Currently, night landing facilities are purely related to airline needs and operational needs and the availability of land is not yet available at the 25 operational airports where scheduled flights are operated,” said the Ministry.
The list of airports without night landing facilities also includes airports such as Kullu and Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, Bilaspur and Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh, Kalaburagi in Karnataka, Kolhapur and Sindhudurg in Maharashtra and Ludhiana in Punjab, among others.
AAI has carried out the installation of night landing gear at Kolhapur airport. The team from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) conducted an airport inspection on June 10, 2022. AAI has taken steps to comply with the observations made by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation during the inspection.
The country has more than 100 operational airports and officials say airports that do not have night landing facilities are mostly airports with low air passenger traffic. The Airports Authority of India, which manages most of the country’s airports, is exploring the possibility of providing night landing facilities at certain airports, when airlines show interest in night operations.
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