Ghaziabad: “What can you say about its future when the government is not even renewing the lease?” asks Abhishek Garg, whose family owns most of the land on which the Hindon terminal, the civilian adjunct of this prime Indian Air Force base, stands.
Commissioned in 2019 to supplement Delhi’s IGI Airport, mainly as a base for affordable UDAN (ude desh ka aam nagrik) flights, the Hindon civil terminal never fulfilled the role it was set up for. For no apparent fault of its own. The closure of Jet Airways in 2019 and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 changed both scale and mood in the aviation sector. The Hindon terminal never got the tailwind it needed.
Today, just one airline operates from the terminal – a Star Airlines flight to Hubli-Kalburgi in Karnataka. There has been talk of more, flight links to the Ayodhya and Kushinagar airports, but those are yet to fructify. Besides, with more slots for airlines being available at IGIA and Delhi-NCR’s second proper international airport being built at Jewar in Greater Noida, aviation experts don’t see a future for the Ghaziabad terminal.
12/12/21 Abhijay Jha/Times of India
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