Navi Mumbai airport likely to be inaugurated on April 17

The upcoming Navi Mumbai International Airport is set to be functional from early next fiscal year with the expected inauguration of the facility on April 17, a senior Adani Group official said on Sunday.

Earlier in the day, an IndiGo A320 passenger aircraft landed successfully at 1.32 pm at runway 08/26 of the under-construction Navi Mumbai International Airport, paving the way for the Navi Mumbai International Airport Ltd (NMIAL) to seek an aerodrome licence from the aviation safety regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to start commercial flight services.

"Our ambition is to do the commercial inauguration of the airport by April 17," Adani Airport Holdings Ltd CEO Arun Bansal told the media after the successful trial landing of the first civil passenger aircraft.

NMIAL is a 74:26  joint venture between Adani Airport Holdings Limited (AAHL) and City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO).

Bansal said that the domestic operations will start from the second half of May as after the inaugural flight some procedures will have to be followed which will take about four weeks.

And by the end of July, he said, "we expect to start international operations."

"A historic milestone as Navi Mumbai International Airport welcomed its first commercial validation flight! Proud of our team's hard work and grateful for our stakeholders' unwavering support," said Jeet Advani, Director, AAHL in a post on  X formerly Twitter.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February 2018 laid the foundation stone for the new airport, which is coming up at an investment of Rs 16,700-crore with an aim to reduce the congestion at the capacity-constrained Mumbai Airport along with meeting the soaring demand for air travel in the country.

The facility with two runways and four terminals will have a capacity to cater to 90 million passengers per annum once all the five phases of the projects are completed.

The first and second phases will have one runway, one terminal building.

The subsequent phases 3, 4, and 5 will introduce a second runway, four additional terminals, and an increased passenger capacity of 90 million.

"Mumbai Airport currently, which has issues because of the single runway, handles around 50 million passengers per month that is the pant-up demand of almost 60-65 million passengers per annum today.

"This means that 15 million passengers from Mumbai region are travelling to nearby states or other airports," he said.

Emphasising that the facility will aid the increasing air passenger traffic in the region, he said that "airlines are very keen on their own to move to the new airport and we will be able to capture that additional passenger growth Mumbai will have."

Bansal also said that since all domestic airlines are big enough it is unlikely that they will move their entire operations to Navi Mumbai International Airport and so they may have split operations between the two international airports in the MMR region.

He said that a single runway can handle up to 50 air traffic movements per hour and so capacity wise there will not be any problem but terminal (passenger handling) capacity will be a problem for the first few years as Terminal One has a capacity of only 20 million passengers, which can't be stretched further until the second terminal comes up.

He said the second terminal, for which the work has already begun, will have a capacity to handle 30 million passengers annually and should go live by the end of March 2028.

According to him, the Navi Mumbai Airport will be able to handle 10-12 million passengers by December 2025 and 20 million passengers by the first half of CY 2026.

Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMAI) in a release stated that it took a further step toward becoming operational with its first commercial flight validation test, with the successful touchdown at 1.32 pm at runway 08/26.

The aircraft was welcomed with the traditional water salute by two Crash Fire Tenders (CFT) of NMIA.

"This is a momentous day for Navi Mumbai International Airport.

"The successful completion of the validation flight is a major milestone, and we are now one step closer to operationalising the airport, prioritising safety at every step," said Bansal.

The touchdown of a commercial aircraft validates and establishes the synchronised functioning of Instrument Approach Procedures at NMIA.

The exercise includes technical assessment, landing and take-off manoeuvres, paving the way for the DGCA to validate the data collected from the flight and for NMIA to receive the aerodrome license, which is essential to operate the airport.

Post the successful landing, NMIA's established flight procedures will be published in the Electronic Aeronautical Information Publication (eAIP) for international promulgation.

Prior to the landing of the validation flight, NMIA successfully conducted the flight calibration of the Instrument Landing System (ILS) and Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI), subsequently drafting instrument approach procedures to prepare itself for the arrival of the validation flight.