Dabolim Airport

Encyclopedia : D : DA : DAB : Dabolim Airport

{| class="infobox bordered" style="width: 220px; font-size: 95%;" |- ! colspan="4" style="text-align: center; background-color: #4682B4; color: white;" |Dabolim Airport |- |align="center" colspan="4"|

Dabolim Airport is Goa's only domestic and international airport. It is a civil airport that is also used for military aviation purposes. This ambiguity is compounded by irony: more credible information is available on Dabolim's military aspects than about crucial civilian parameters such as the runway length, width and thickness! We also do not know what the rated capacity is in terms of annual passenger handling levels and what the actuals currently are.(See external links below). Unfortunately, information gaps beget communication gaps and this may be inescapable at Dabolim airport.

It was first built by the Portuguese authorities in the 50's. Up to 1961 it served as the main hub for the local airline "Transportes Aereos da India Portuguesa", which on a regular schedule served Karachi, Mozambique and Timor, among many other destinations. After December 1961, it was occupied by the Indian Navy's air wing. The Indian Navy has also illegally annexed land surrounding the installations.

The total airport area involved is reportedly to the extent of about 1700 acres. This seems adequate for a fair sized Indian civilian airport. But it may be too big for naval flight training while being too small for naval armament training. For purposes of the flight training at Dabolim, the Indian Navy's flagship, an aircraft carrier, has been based at the adjoining harbour which, however, is merely a secondary one among the Indian Navy's ports. The flight training at the airport is carried out on 4 days of the week for 4.5 hours in the morning during which civilian flights cannot operate. Charter flights carrying international tourists during the season tend to avail of the freer civil aviation regimes on weekends (Friday through Sunday).

Parenthetically, the earliest international tourists to Goa may have been the "flower children" (hippies) of the 1960s who used the overland route from Bombay (now Mumbai), detorruing via Poona (now Pune), to north Goa's beaches, a torturous (if scenic) trip taking 24 hours then and at least 12 hours now (vs a mere 1 hour of plane travel). Civilian (domestic) air travel out of Dabolim may have been facilitated early on by the Indian Navy and the Indian government for official and personal travel purposes by inviting the public sector airline (known now as Indian) to operate at Dabolim.

Once two vital road bridges across the main waterways of Goa were built by the early 1980s and Goa hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 1983, the charter flight business began to take off in the late 1980s. Reportedly Goa's 700 odd flights per year account for over 90% of the country's international charter tourist flights at present. This may have made Goans with their maritime traditions and agrarian preoccupations realise the value of air travel and inbound tourism. Outbound international air travel was via the Mumbai or Delhi gateways as Dabolim's scheduled international flights are few and far between due to a fairly high level of seasonality in traffic.

At the Indian "metro" airports international flights tend to operate during the night. So the Indian Navy unilaterally opened Dabolim airport for night flights in 2003. There seem to be no takers yet for this gesture meant to accommodate presumed-to-be-felt civilian needs. In part this was because domestic airlines were hesitant to re-cast their schedules specifically for Goa. It may also be due to mundane problems of manning the facilities which was mainly in the bailiwick of the public sector Airports Authority of India (AAI). At non-metro airports such as Dabolim, AAI was believed to adhere bureaucratically to working hours set decades ago in a different aviation era.

Recent civic movements in Goa demand Dabolim to be reverted to its erstwhile fully civilian status and the Indian Navy to fully abandon Dabolim, possibly shifting to the new "INS Kadamba" naval base at Karwar, 70 km southwards from Dabolim. Plans for a 6000 foot airfield here have, however, suddenly shrunk to one for a mere naval heliport. The Dabolim runway too is variously estimated at about 8000 feet or 10-11 thousand feet in length by the Indian Navy itself. There is also uncertainty about whether jumbo jets actually use the airport.

From the very beginning when the Indian Navy visualised Dabolim as the centrepiece of its long term aim of becoming a regional power in naval aviation (perhaps on the lines of "Fightertown, U.S.A" which was celebrated on celluloid and to whose real-life location the Goa aviation scene bears an uncanny resemblance), it has steadfastly and very stealthily tried to ensure its entrenchment there. Towards this end it recently acquired an old aircraft carrier from Russia (currently undergoing refitting there) to replace the present one. A new round of flight training will begin in about a couple of years for the new planes the vessel is equipped with. Reportedly, a mock-up of the deck is being built at Dabolim airport for training purposes.

The Indian Navy also hopes to gain total control of Dabolim airport once a new civilian airport is built in Mopa in northern Goa with sweeteners like a 6 lane north-south highway, a rail link and even a monorail being touted by the state government to provide surface access. Indeed, the Union Cabinet in Delhi passed a resolution back in 2000 to close the Dabolim civilian facility if and when this happens. Thus the civic movement alluded to above, backed by the powerful hoteliers lobby of South Goa, is actually more about "stopping Mopa" than about getting the Indian Navy to relocate to Karwar. It is apprehended that a civil enclave may, in fact, continue at Dabolim but it would either be rendered redundant in due course by the extravagant A380 super jumbo facility planned for Mopa or it would be reserved, on the usual "security grounds", for VVIPs on their occasional Goa sojourns.

Even so, the Civil Aviation Ministry has, in response to the local agitation, announced a plan to upgrade Dabolim airport to the tune of about Rs 5 billion, half the cost estimated for the new Mopa airport. This will mainly involve addition of a new passenger terminal and several aircraft parking bays. A proposal along these lines has been pending with the Navy for several years. The present plan has been made a part of the urgent modernisation of 35 "non-metro" airports, country-wide, scheduled to commence, simultaneously, in 2007 and be completed in three phases in two years. It is not yet known if there will be connectivity problems for passengers and others between the old and new terminals at Dabolim airport and the kind of access that is envisaged.

Meanwhile the high-level committee formed by the Prime Minister in January 2006 to advise him about the fate of the Mopa project is due to give its decision in October 2006. There is no push for a review of the March 2000 Cabinet decision to level the playing field even though a precedent may have been set recently by the Prime Minister single-handedly reversing a three-week old Cabinet decision and even extending it to place other similar proposals (about disinvestment/privatisation) on hold.

Interestingly, the military and its votaries tend to deal with challenges to its presence at Dabolim either by stonewalling i.e. engaging in unintelligible techno-talk, use of undiscussable shorthand such as "security reasons" or through plain bureaucratic dithering in the face of explosive growth in Indian civil aviation; or by turning the tables by accusing challengers of being unpatriotic, and engaging in incipient incitement, insurgency and insurrection! In part this may be a fall-out of historical factors alluded to above. It may also be due to the severe lack of an established mechanism in India to review, re-configure and if necessary close military bases at periodic intervals as is done in the U.S.A. But such communication problems cascade subtly into far-reaching governance problems in and for the state of Goa.

Destinations

Scheduled domestic flights from Goa to:

Scheduled international flights from Goa to:

Many charter airlines operate into Goa on a seasonal basis. Charter flights are available to and from many UK and European destinations, as well as Israel.

Airlines

Spicejet, a low cost airline
Jet Airways, seen as India's best airline
Indian, the state owned domestic airline
Air India, the state owned international airline, that flies some domestic services
Kingfisher Airlines, the chic one-class modern airline, with a new fleet and innovative service
Goair, a small, low cost airline
Air Deccan, India's first low cost airline, with a simple 'pay for what you want' approach

External links

Airports in India

(1)Designated as customs airports. A few International flights operates from here.

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