The swanky shining glass and steel of India’s new airports hide an underbelly rumbling with take-off troubles.
It ranges the whole gamut—from airports opened with great fanfare but now with no civilian flights and airliners threatening not to fly due to high overheads—to even one airport which some believe is haunted by ghosts!
The latest (and most topical) issue revolves around the just-inaugurated Noida International Airport.
Not only is it slated to add to the existing Delhi Indira Gandhi as well as the Hindon, and become the third airport to service India’s national capital region, its full plan—upon completion—is to become India’s biggest airport, with four parallel runways and crores of passengers per annum.
If airliners don’t throw a tantrum and walk off before it sees its inaugural flight on June 15th, that is.
Presently, the two leading domestic operators, Indigo and Air India, have both submitted to the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA) their opposition to the high User Development Fee (UDF) that the Noida airport plans to charge.
Noida has proposed a UDF of Rs 653 per passenger who takes a domestic flight from here, hiking it over the coming years by about 41 per cent in about five years' time.
In comparison, Delhi's Indira Gandhi airport charges just Rs 129 per departing domestic economy passenger, while Mumbai’s Chhattrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport charges just Rs 175.
In fact, the two top airlines argue that the rates being sought from two of the much-touted new metro airports, Noida as well as Navi Mumbai, are not only higher than other airports, but that they are exorbitant and that it could lead to a lower number of passengers at a time when passenger demand is falling and spiralling oil prices are pressurising airline profits.
Just like Noida, the Adani-operated Navi Mumbai's charges are also high, at Rs 620 per departing domestic economy passenger (and Rs 270 for arriving passengers).
AERA now has to take a call on what is the final permissible rate. In Parliament in February, Minister of State for Aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, had said that the temporary (ad hoc) highest rate that both airports could charge is Rs 620 (Navi Mumbai), which it is charging presently, and Rs 490 for Noida (the airport authorities are asking way more than this).
With fuel costs spiralling due to the ongoing Iran war, all Indian airlines had added a surcharge to ticket prices last month. High UDF means passengers have to shell out that much more while flying to those specific airports, making their tickets even more expensive than they already are.
Thanks to the Modi government pushing airline travel by setting up a string of new airports across the country, with UDAN schemes ostensibly offering economical flight tickets from mofussil towns and airlines like IndiGo—that is eager to discover and open routes to new destinations in the hinterlands—India is already the world’s fastest growing aviation market.
But recent geopolitical developments threaten to derail this boom. For the new airports, too, while the urge to recoup their massive investments is a necessity, too much haste and greed—and a lack of timing and planning—could prove to be disastrous.
Ask those string of flashy airports which opened to great fanfare over the past few years, but are now defunct for lack of viability.
Except for Ayodhya, all new airports that opened in Uttar Pradesh since 2021 are now ‘non-operational’—Azamgarh, Aligarh, Chitrakoot, Shravasti, Moradabad, and Kushinagar.
The Kannur airport, launched with great fanfare in Kerala, is also struggling to get by. The original premise was that it could tap into the huge diaspora in the Middle East, but with the airport not being given a Point of Call status (which permits international airlines to operate there), it presently has to make do with a clutch of flights by Air India Express and Indigo. Losses so far? Rs 742 crore.
Goa’s second airport in Mopa may have had better luck. Despite the tourist hub’s notorious taxi mafia taking arriving passengers for a rude ride (literally) and water issues, the airport has proved to be a better point to access Goa’s popular beaches and party spots to the north than the existing Dabolim airport, and it is expected that the airport’s growth will help expand the development of beaches and resorts (real estate as well) further north up the Konkan coast into Maharashtra.
But, all these best-case-scenarios may just have to deal with some supernatural forces first. Local beliefs centred around the Barazan Plateau, which was flattened to construct the Mopa airport, say it was the abode of the spirits of ancestral headmen who now haunt it.
And there are claims that there have been howling noises, ghosts in sarees and what not roaming around the runway at night—a YouTube creator was even arrested on charges of spreading ‘misinformation’ after he did a video claiming the airport was haunted.
Perhaps he just saw some tourist in a state of post-party revelry, who neither wanted to go back nor pay the steep UDF of Rs 820 that Mopa's operator GMR charges: perhaps the highest in the country for a domestic passenger!