MUMBAI: The Navi Mumbai airport project is set to cross a major milestone on Sunday as the first-ever commercial aircraft will make a landing on its new runway around noon. IndiGo is expected to operate the inaugural flight into Navi Mumbai airport on December 29, said sources.
Commercial airline flights, carrying passengers, is expected to begin around March end, when the Navi Mumbai airport will be commissioned.
In October, the Indian Air Force operated inaugural flights to Navi Mumbai airport with an Airbus C-295 aircraft touching down on the brand new runway 08-26. A Sukhoi SU-30 too did a low flypast, prompting a round of applause from the gathered crowd.
However, IAF aircraft landings are not the norm for a civil airport. The significant milestone is crossed when a commercial aircraft—the one that carries passengers—makes a landing, testing the new runway, the air navigation services, the landing aids installed on the ground, etc. Officials from CIDCO and Navi Mumbai International Airport Limited will attend the event.
Two weeks ago, the Navi Mumbai International Airport, in collaboration with Airports Authority of India (AAI), successfully completed flight calibration of the PAPI (Precision Approach Path Indicator) equipment of its south runway 08/26. PAPI is an essential visual navigation aid and a critical component of the aeronautical ground lighting system, which assists pilots in maintaining the correct glide slope during landing.
The commercial operations of Navi Mumbai airport, the second airport to serve the Mumbai Metropolitan region, are expected to begin by the end of March 2025. The deadline was announced by former civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia earlier this year.
During his visit to the Navi Mumbai airport site, Scindia said that the govt has planned a “Gati Shakti model with multi-modal connectivity”—the airport will have road, rail, and metro connectivity, with future plans for water connectivity as well.
In phase 1, the airport will have a single runway and a terminal building—design inspired by a lotus—with a capacity of handling 2 crore passengers per annum. The 2 lakh square metre T1 is being designed as per LEED Gold standards (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a green building certification program used worldwide).
Currently, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, with its single runway operations and two passenger terminals, is the only air transport option for people from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). When both airports are operational, the MMR region would be served by about 1,500 flights a day, said a source. Navi Mumbai airport will eventually have a set of parallel runways, making it the first such airport in the MMR region. The airports that serve Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, and other major airports in the world are served by parallel runways.
The Mumbai airport was India’s busiest airport until 2011 when infrastructure constraints stifled its growth and Delhi overtook it. Between 2015 and 2018, while airports across India witnessed double-digit growth in domestic passenger traffic for 48 consecutive months, Mumbai was held back due to infrastructure constraints.