KOCHI: The Cochin International Airport is raring to fly high with Thai AirAsia set to start its maiden service to Bangkok next month and the latest draft of Modi government’s civil aviation policy keeping mum on the previous controversial proposal of giving international hub status to six metro airports.
The future of the airport faced a real threat with Centre initially mulling to sanction the international hub status to only Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi airports. This meant that these airports will only be included in the future bilaterals with foreign airlines and international passenger and cargo movement will be held only through these airports.
“This would have meant passengers coming from the Gulf being able to get down in Mumbai and Chennai and then proceed through another aircraft to Kerala. This would have taken us to old days and struck at the root of the Cochin airport. Maybe due to stiff opposition from different states including Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Odisha, this was dropped from the latest draft,” said a civil aviation expert.
The proposal was to grant the hub status to Chennai, which is behind Cochin in international passenger traffic holding the fourth position. Despite this Tamil Nadu opposed the move along with Maharashtra.
“Geographically, the international hub airport model is not suited to a large country like India. Moreover in other parts of the world, there is an anchor airline for each airport as Etihad in the case of Abu Dhabi and Emirates for Dubai. Here it is difficult to offer like that,” said the aviation expert.
