25 airports in India have no night landing facility

New Delhi: Twenty-five airports in India do not have facilities for night landings, including Kushinagar airport, Shimla airport and the recently inaugurated Deoghar airport in Jharkhand.

On Monday, the civil aviation ministry said in the Rajya Sabha that upgrading and modernization of airports, including night landing facilities, is a continuous process which is undertaken by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and other airport operators from time to time based on the availability of land, commercial viability, socio-economic considerations, traffic demand and willingness of airlines to operate to/from such airports etc.

"Presently night landing facility which is purely demand and need based on the operational requirement of airlines and availability of land is not available at 25 operational airports with scheduled flight operations," said the ministry.

The list of airports not having night landing facility also include airports like Kullu and Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, Bilaspur and Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh, Kalaburagi in Karnataka, Kolhapur and Sindhudurg in Maharashtra and Ludhiana in Punjab among others, IANS reported.

AAI has undertaken the installation of a night landing facility at Kolhapur airport. A team of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) inspected the airport on June 10, 2022. AAI has already initiated action for compliance with the observations made by DGCA during the inspection.

There are more than 100 operational airports in the country, officials said, and most of the airports that do not have night landing facilities have less passenger traffic. The Airports Authority of India, which manages most of India's airports, considers a particular one to provide night landing facilities when airlines show interest in night operations.