Airfield rots in wilderness

Kolkata: Two rusty tin sheds and a gleaming one. A dilapidated two-storied building. A stretch of asphalt with weeds creeping over the edges in the middle of a concrete jungle. That's Behala airport, once a premier flight training facility that produced airline pilots. For the past couple of decades though, it has been lying abandoned with hardly any sign of activity.
Infrastructure at the airfield, located to the south-west of the city, has always been basic. There were two hangars, a taxiway and a dirt runway that was shut during monsoon. A two-level building with an air traffic control tower was constructed later. But it was rarely used in the absence of commercial operations. Training of pilots continued from the late 1950s till the mid-1980s before sputtering out in 1993. The state-run West Bengal Flight Training Institute (WBFTI) was grounded.
Barring odd-attempts to revive the airfield and promises of a better future, not much has moved. The fair weather dirt runway was converted into all-weather asphalt strip some years ago. A private firm started a flying training institute but it shut down within a year and a half.
The twin hangars reflect the condition of the flying institutes they house. Hangar No.1, housing WBFTI, is in a shambles with the planes rusting.
Hangar No.2 that houses four Cessna aircraft and a helicopter of the Camellia Institute of Aviation and a microlight aircraft of the National Cadet Corps is slightly better managed. But there is no activity here either as Camellia has been forced to shut down due to a legal tangle with Airports Authority of India (AAI).
The sole silver lining in the winter haze that smothers the airfield is the new Hangar No.3 located at a distance. Trans Bharat Aviation has spent Rs 2 crore on it and plans to start its aviation academy early next year. It has ambitious plans of utilising the airfield for non-scheduled helicopter services to business destinations in south Bengal.
30/11/11 Subhro Niyogi/Times of India

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Categories: airports Nov 2011