Kadapa Airport to have night landing facility soon

ANANTAPUR: Kadapa Airport will soon have a night landing facility. The development comes with the AP government handing over 70 acres of land to the Airports Authority of India (AAI), sources said.

With availability of additional land, the AAI will expand the runway, provide night landing facilities and also construct four new aprons. All these works are expected to be completed within a short period of time. Kadapa Airport will thus be linked with round the clock air services, which will greatly benefit people of Rayalaseema region.

At present, the nearest night landing facility is at Tirupati Airport. Orvakal Airport in Kurnool district is limited to only day services. Puttaparthi Airport in Satya Sai district has no private carriers operating from it. It is confined to VIP visits by special aircrafts.

However, with Kadapa Airport expanding along with night landing facility, air traffic will increase, enabling passengers from the region to have easy access to various parts of the country and abroad.

Kadapa Airport had first been constructed way back in 1953 with a 3,500 feet (1,067 metres) runway. In 1980s, Vayudoot operated services to Kadapa from Hyderabad. In 2009, a new 6,562 feet × 150 feet (2,000 metres × 46 metres) runway had been completed at a cost of ₹21 crore on Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis. In addition, a 11-km long compound wall had been built with an outlay of ₹24 crore.

In the second phase, an Air Traffic Control (ATC) building, passenger terminal, parking bays and internal roads came up at a cost of ₹13 crore, along with other facilities involving an expenditure of ₹8 crore.

Scheduled commercial flights from the developed Kadapa Airport started on June 7, 2015, with Air Pegasus launching its thrice weekly ATR-72 service to Bengaluru. However, the airline failed in continuing these services.

Subsequently, TruJet Airways came forward and ran aircrafts from Kadapa. But its services also stopped.

Following the initiative of state government, private airliner IndiGo has been operating aircraft services between Kadapa-Hyderabad every day. In addition, there are connecting services to Goa, Thiruvananthapuram, Madurai, Bhubaneswar, Rajahmundry, Raipur, Indore, Jabalpur, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Varanasi, Jaipur, Surat, Ranchi and New Delhi every day.

Kadapa-Vijayawada and Kadapa-Chennai services are available on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.