Agra airport loses business to Lucknow

After losing its chance of being turned into an international airport, Agra has again suffered a major setback with the union aviation ministry deciding to "overfly" the city's airport while offering Lucknow a chance to share the winter flight load of the fogged-down Delhi airport.

Each year during the winters, the international airport at Delhi gets covered with fog making it hard to land flights there for several days in the season.

Flights approaching Delhi during these bad conditions are often routed to nearby airports of like Jaipur, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. The larger aircraft have to be diverted to Mumbai as other airports have smaller runways unfit to land large aircraft. Some of these aircraft are also landed at Agra, which is barely 15 minutes away from Delhi.

Sources claimed that as it was a part of the Agra air force base, the runways available at the Agra airport were sufficient to land even the largest of aircrafts and advanced instrumental landing system was available at the airport to facilitate low-visibility and night landings.

The ministry of aviation has ruled out the possibilities of Agra being used as a landing site in foggy weather and has suggested that Lucknow may be used as the nearest alternative for an international airport.

While the local tourism industry is terming it as an unfair, industry sources believe that the aviation ministry had arrived on the decision in light of the fact that the Lucknow airport was already handling international flights, it is equipped with necessary infrastructure for immigration and customs while in Agra, such facilities need to be arranged, which was not possible at short notice.

Besides, sources claimed, being controlled by the Indian Air Force, landings and takeoffs at the Agra airport were highly regulated and such restrictions were not considered suitable for operation of international aircraft.