NEW DELHI: The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has come up with a novel idea of keeping an aircraft exclusively for the North East at Shillong or Guwahati to improve inter-state air connectivity in the region.
Such a dedicated aircraft can be used for movement of tourists, traders, doctors, those in need of medical attention, students, government officials and so on.”This one aircraft can become the game-changer for this part of the country,” it said.
“Movement within NER (Northeast region) is difficult, unsafe, time-consuming and costly by other means,” AAI’s regional executive director for the North East, Sanjeev Jindal, wrote in letters to top officials of Trujet, SpiceJet and Indigo airlines on October 1.
“We suggest if one small aircraft like ATR is placed at one of the stations such as Guwahati/Shillong/Lengpui and that connects different airports it will be very profitable sector at one hand as well as it will be a turning point for the Northeast region,” he said.
“For an airline like the IndiGo, if they base an aircraft in the region, it will be a win-win situation for they can service both, the routes allotted to them under the RCS and other commercial routes,” Jindal said.
As of now, 12 out of the 21 airports in the eight states of the North East are functional. Guwahati has connections to eight of the 11 other functional airports in the region and Imphal has direct flights to Aizawl, Guwahati and Agartala apart from flights to other airports in the country.
However, most other airports have a few flights to airports in the region mostly connecting them to Guwahati or Kolkata and Delhi. From Shillong and Dimapur, however, Kolkata is the only flying option and Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh and Lilabari in Assam have flights only for Guwahati besides a flight to both the airports.
Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram, has only 10 flights a week to Kolkata and Imphal since Jet Airways shut its operations in February. Again out of the six routes awarded in the first two phases only one connecting Jorhat to Kolkata is functional.
The response to UDAN3 was good, yet, none of the 15 routes that were awarded has taken off yet. Some other routes, for example, the one connecting Tezu in Arunachal Pradesh to Guwahati and Jorhat in Assam are non-functional at the moment.
Services to Rupsi airport in Assam are also yet to begin.
“There isn’t much of an improvement in the air connectivity situation in Mizoram except Go Air’s flight connecting Aizawl to Delhi via Guwahati is launching this month.”
Passenger movement at the Guwahati airport registered a surge of over 23 per cent in 2018-19 from the previous year, according to records.
