Dabolim Airport

Dabolim Airport (IATA: GOI, ICAO: VAGO) is Goa's only domestic and international airport. It is a civil airport that is also used for military aviation purposes. As such its future is exercising some of the top minds in India. The stark policy options are (a) to continue with the present arrangement of "mixed use" (b) gradually harmonise and integrate into effective "joint use" (c) engineer the exit of either the military or the civilian arm.

History

It was first built by the Portuguese authorities in the 1950s. Until 1961 it served as the main hub for the local airline Transportes Aereos da India Portuguesa, which on a regular schedule served Karachi, Mozambique and Timor, among many other destinations. After December 1961, it was occupied by the Indian Navy's air wing. The Indian Navy's continuation since then is by Central Government fiat and may be of an extralegal nature since it is neither a 'tenant' or a 'landlord' in Goa. It merely 'controls' Dabolim airport. There is no known proposal pending with the state government to regularise the title to the airport land.

In a reply in Parliament recently, the Indian Defence minister stated that Dabolim airport was "handed over" in April 1962 by the the then military governor, Lt. Gen K.P. Candeth who had led the Indian military's successful move into Goa a few months earlier. The Indian military apparently has a propensity, dating back at least to World War II times, to commandeer even private property during major conflicts and then stay put despite persistent representations to the highest authorities in the land that the original purpose has been served long ago.

Form vs Function

The total airport area involved is reportedly to the extent of about 1700 acres. This seems adequate for a fair sized Indian civilian airport. But it may be too big for naval flight training while being too small for naval armament training.

For purposes of the flight training at Dabolim, the Indian Navy's flagship, INS Viraat, an aircraft carrier, has been based at Mumbai which is 700 km north and is the largest among Indian Navy's ports. The flight training at Dabolim is carried out on 4 days of the week for 4.5 hours in the morning and for another hour in the evening, during which civilian flights cannot operate. Charter flights carrying international tourists during the season tend to avail of the freer civil aviation regimes on weekends (Friday through Sunday).

Brief Hiatus, 1961-66

Historically, the earliest international tourists to Goa may have been the flower children (hippies) of the 1960s who used the overland route from Bombay (now Mumbai)-- with which Goans have had a long historical link -- detouring via Poona (now Pune), to north Goa's beaches, a torturous (if scenic) trip taking 24 hours then and at least 12 hours now (vs a mere 1 hour of plane travel). Costs by all modes of inter-city transport are comparatively higher. Civilian (domestic) air travel out of Dabolim may have been facilitated early on by the Indian Navy and the Indian government for official and personal travel purposes by inviting the public sector airline (known now as Indian) to operate at Dabolim from about 1966 after the runway was made (passenger) jet-enabled.

Charter flights takeoff

Once two vital road bridges across the main waterways of Goa were built by the early 1980s and Goa hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 1983, the charter flight business began to take off in the late 1980s.

Reportedly Goa's 700 odd flights per year account for over 90% of the country's international charter tourist flights at present. This may have made Goans with their maritime traditions and agrarian preoccupations realise the value of air travel and inbound international tourism. However, no database has yet been created in Goa about the extent and nature of charter tourism (also known as leisure flight operations) for purposes of analysis and planning.

Recently the Civil Aviation Ministry announced a relaxation in charter flight policy whereby Indians residing abroad could also avail of charter flights and all charter flight passengers (Indian and foreign) could stay in India for longer periods. This is expected to benefit non-resident Goans travelling on a 'visiting friends and relatives' (VFR) basis.

Scheduled international air travel

Outbound (as well as inbound) international air travel was via the Mumbai or Delhi gateways as Dabolim's scheduled international flights are sporadic. Currently these are operated only to the Persian Gulf region by the two state owned carriers who have been granted a duopoly of this sector for a few more years.

All foreign carriers are disallowed from operating scheduled flights to/from Goa even though it is periodically reported that there is interest on the part of some of these carriers to operate such scheduled services.

Transit via Mumbai (Bombay)

In the meantime, transit via Mumbai has become problematic for some foreign nationals (Japanese) participating in somewhat high profile events/programs in Goa due to the increased terrorist threat being faced by Mumbai.

Night flights

At the Indian "metro" airports, international flights tend to operate during the night. So the Indian Navy unilaterally opened Dabolim airport for night flights in 2003. There seem to be no takers yet for this gesture meant to accommodate presumed-to-be-felt civilian needs.

In part this was because domestic airlines were hesitant to re-cast their schedules specifically for Goa. It may also be due to mundane problems of manning the facilities which was mainly in the bailiwick of the public sector Airports Authority of India (AAI).

At non-metro airports such as Dabolim, AAI (whose employees union was controlled by the Left parties) was believed to adhere bureaucratically to working hours set decades ago in a different aviation era. It even doesn't seem to manage garbage generated by the airport sensibly, disposing it nearby and creating a potential hazard of bird hits to aircraft. This is now being rectified.

Navy revenues, AAI expenditures

Air traffic control (ATC) at Dabolim is solely in the hands of the Indian Navy. Oddly enough, the Navy is said to earn revenues from this service perhaps to the tune of at least Rs 700 million a year at Dabolim, making it nominally a "profitable" airport, which only the top ten airports of India presently are. Interestingly, these ten are believed to account for 90% of domestic traffic.

Note, however, that capital expenditures (such as for runway expansion etc) at the airport are covered by the Airports Authority of India which is consequently asking for an equitable sharing of the navigation and landing charges.

Campaign to revert to civilian status

Recent civic movements in Goa demand that Dabolim's erstwhile fully civilian status be restored and that the Indian Navy should fully abandon Dabolim, possibly shifting to an airfield in the new INS Kadamba naval base at Karwar, 70 km south of Dabolim. Plans for a 6000 foot runway there have however suddenly shrunk to one for a mere naval heliport and seem to have vanished altogether from public announcements during the past year. The Indian Navy's top officers in Goa have broadly hinted from time to time that the "investment" at Dabolim naval air station is of seemingly astronomical proportions and it would be impossible to replicate this (overnight) at Karwar. The aerial view in the infobox (click on coordinates) does not seem to bear out this stand. In fact even a casual look out of the window of a passenger plane while it is taxiing on arrival/departure is unlikely to result in a feeling of being in a bustling military air base. If one does not miss the military trappings completely, the only impression may be of 50s style prop driven aircraft/helicopters parked in or near Navy hangars.

Capacity Considerations

The single Dabolim runway too is variously estimated at about 8000 feet or 10-11 thousand feet in length by the Indian Navy itself. There is also uncertainty about whether Boeing 747 aircraft actually use the airport. But this does underline the anomalous situation of an airport for "wide-bodied" jets being used mainly for vertical/short take-off landing (V/STOL) military aircraft (see below).

There is even an information gap about the rated capacity of the airport in terms of annual passenger handling levels and their actuals. For the sake of discussion, the rated capacity can be equated to that of Bangalore's HAL airport viz 6 million passengers a year. But more on this later. Gleaning piecemeal information available from various sources, it appears that from an average of about 800,000 passengers a year between 1999 and 2001, the total has risen to an estimated 2.2 million in FY05.

This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 20% over 5 years (2000-2005). The month-on-month growth for April in 2005-06 alone was over 100%. Most of the traffic in the 2005-06 period (77%) was from domestic passengers, the balance being accounted for by international travellers numbering about 320,000 in the last "season".

Congestion levels are thus likely to be very high especially as the Indian Civil Aviation Ministry projects an average annual growth rate of 20-25% for the country as a whole over the next few years. Indeed, going by recent scraps of data about Goa's airport, Dabolim is probably already handling 2.92 million passengers annually (at the reported average rate of 8000 per day from an average of 56 daily flights).

This reflects a 32% increase over our earlier estimate of 2.2 million which is above the projected national average. In the process, however, air passenger statistics at Dabolim seem to be bumping up against annual tourism figures (domestic + foreign) for Goa, casting doubts on both.

International analysts place future Indian aviation growth squarely in the domain of domestic leisure travel, a prospect (along with the adjacent segment of Meetings-Incentives-Coventions-Entertainment, or MICE) Dabolim would normally be perfectly positioned to exploit. Instead the Indian Navy dithers at Dabolim and diverts criticism of slot-consuming military flight training activities by noting that the airport is underutilised, perhaps on the basis of unused night hours.

There seems to be a disconnect between the blocking of scheduled international flights at Dabolim on security grounds and simultaneously complaining about non-utilisation of night hours. In fact if a downward adjustment is made for the night hours and the military flight training hours, Dabolim airport probably reached saturation levels earlier this year and is now exceeding it already by a wide margin.

Yet, what the data show is that from April 2005 to April 2006, Cochin International Airport managed to edge out Dabolim while Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport overtook both of them in the total passenger sweepstakes. Without complete, comparable -- and credible-- annual information on Dabolim for benchmarking purposes, proper planning for the airport for the sake of the state's development is handicapped and Dabolim is likely to slip further down the rankings purely by default.

Reservation for VVIPs?

Indeed, the dubious prospects 5-10 years hence are for Dabolim airport to end up being reserved for VVIP travellers perhaps along the lines of what is in store for Hyderabad's and Bangalore's old airports (and what the RAF already does at a base outside London for the royal family and select British VIPs). It has already been observed that security checks for VIPs tend to be far more lax than for ordinary travellers at Indian airports.

In fact, it is now also reported that some South Goa hotels do operate helicopter services from Dabolim for some of their guests. Furthermore, there are said to be three helipads just north of the capital Panjim (now Panaji), in a prime coastal belt, which may be in a state of disuse and may be re-activated in the foreseeable future.

Indian Navy's role

From the very beginning when the Indian Navy visualised Dabolim as the centrepiece of its long term aim of becoming a regional power in naval aviation (perhaps on the lines of "Fightertown, U.S.A" which was celebrated on celluloid and to whose real-life location the Goa aviation scene bears an uncanny resemblance, http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2006/09/26/government/905navytown.txt ), it has steadfastly and very stealthily tried to ensure its entrenchment there.

As mentioned above, at the heart of this strategy lies the practice of military flight training. The base is shortly expected to house four MIG-29KUBs (two seater trainers) which will be inducted into the navy with a complement of 12 single seater MIG-29Ks purchased with the aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya. Since MIG-29Ks are untried and untested anywhere in the operational context, a new round of intensive flight training will begin in about a couple of years for the new planes. Parenthetically, the Russians reportedly discontinued the plan to use the MiG-29K after a crash during carrier trials. In northern India, already two IAF MiG-29s have crashed so far in 2006 though the three occupants bailed out in time. The MiG-29 is reportedly still under development in Russia.

Reportedly, a mock-up of the deck is being built at Dabolim airport for training purposes should the aircraft carrier take the place of its predecessor in Mumbai. Meanwhle the maintenance, repair and overhaul of the INS Viraat's Sea Harriers (whose numbers have declined steadily due to crashes)is located at the naval air station in Kochi, 700 km south.

Besides military flight training involving the Indian Navy's V/STOL aircraft such as helicopters and Sea Harriers, Dabolim airport also hosts exercises by the Indian Air Force's fighter bombers and is a base for the Indian Coast Guard (which operates a fleet of small aircraft).

The Indian Navy also carries out long range maritime patrols as far as the Horn of Africa from Dabolim using aging, unarmed aircraft such as IL-38s which may not be much of a match for the Pakistan military's P-3C Orion strike aircraft which are armed with sea-skimming Harpoon missiles. They have, however, spotted brand new "enemy" warships being ferried from European shipyards through the Red Sea to home bases from time to time. Indian military air transport planes probably transit through Dabolim airport too.

Whatever the nature of the military threat faced by the Navy at Dabolim, a more ever-present one for the people of Goa arises from oil spills and discharge of bilge water by merchant ships close to the coast. This requires effective policing by the Navy and Coast Guard in a coordinated manner. The Navy's meteorological station at Dabolim also needs to interact more closely with the civilian one in Goa to provide early warning of cyclones and other major storms. A hotline between the two may be all that is needed for this purpose.

Recently the Government of India announced the selection of the next Navy chief, an appointment which would take effect on Nov 1, 2006. The designated officer has had a long association wth Dabolim naval air station. In a telephonic interview he reportedly told a local paper that he "was looking forward to major challenges ahead, one of which was to strengthen the naval base in the state" which he believed had grown into a "major" one. "We will add a lot of aviation elements into the Navy in Goa", he is said to have remarked. It seems 30% of the Navy's budget is proposed to be spent on aviation and, hence, Dabolim would be a major beneficiary.

It is noteworthy that of the three promontories in Goa's landscape one (associated with Dabolim airport) is occupied by Navy House, the other by Governor's House and the third by a top-rated hotel building.

Plans for airport at Mopa (Goa)

The Indian Navy hopes to gain total control of Dabolim airport once a new civilian airport is built in Mopa in northern Goa with a 6 lane north-south highway, a rail link and even a monorail being touted by the state government, all on a public-private partnership basis, to provide surface access. Helicopter operations are also envisaged from Mopa.

Indeed, the Union Cabinet in Delhi passed a resolution in 2000 to close the Dabolim civilian facility if and when all this happens. The justification for this decision may lie in the old rule of 150 km separation between airports. This is now being proposed to be reduced to 70 km. But for Dabolim and Mopa to co-exist it may require further reduction to 50 km.

Upgrade of Dabolim

Even so, the Indian Civil Aviation Ministry, under whose central jurisdiction civilian airport matters rest, has, in response to the local agitation in Goa, announced a plan to upgrade Dabolim airport at the cost of about Rs 5 billion, half the cost estimated for the new Mopa airport. This will mainly involve construction of a new passenger terminal and adding several more aircraft stands over an area of about 9 acres. Another estimate places the upgrade plan at about Rs 600-700 million.

A proposal along these lines has been pending for several years with the Navy which, however, considered it as a mutual exchange of land with AAI and included it with several other parcels in other locations whose exchange en masse was approved recently. As a result, AAI now has a total of a little less than 35 acres of land at Dabolim Airport having started off with nearly 15 acres in 1966 and managing to add 10 acres on an ad hoc basis, courtesy of the Navy.

The present plan has been made a part of the urgent modernisation of 35 "non-metro" airports, country-wide, scheduled to commence, simultaneously, in 2007 and to be completed in three phases in two years. Details of the plan are not yet known especially as to the problems, if any, for passengers and others travelling between the two terminals at Dabolim airport and the kind of access that is envisaged. Current reports suggest that there may be a delay in the implementation of the upgrade if any private-public partnership is involved.

High level committee for Mopa

Meanwhile the high-level committee set up by Manmohan Singh in January 2006 to advise him about the fate of the Mopa project is due to give its decision in October 2006. There is no push for a review of the March 2000 Cabinet decision to level the playing field even though a precedent may have been set recently by the Prime Minister single-handedly reversing a three-week old Cabinet decision and even extending it to place other similar proposals (about disinvestment/privatisation) on hold. It also transpires that the techno-economic feasibility study of Mopa airport carried out by ADPI (France)under the aegis of ICAO, and which was released selectively to the media in mid 2005, somehow omitted to cover the functioning of Dabolim airport in its analysis which surprisingly concluded that the Mopa airport could handle A380 superjumbos. The Prime Minister's committee is now calling for a supplementary report which is estimated to take a few more months to prepare. The committee, a small one, consists of top political leaders of Goa including 3 members of parliament and the chief minister of Goa (besides some bureaucrats and co-opted members. Its brief is a seemingly intractable one of getting a consensus on the futuristic Mopa airport or, in its absence, limping along with a stunted Dabolim.

Surface Transport Connectivity

Rates for pre-paid taxis from Dabolim, valid from February 2006. Click to read details (viewable).

As in the case of computer peripherals, the question of 'fit' between an airport and its surface transport links is an important one.Goa's Dabolim airport is poorly connected by public transport. Passengers usually avail of a taxi service to reach the place. Public buses, which tend to be over-crowded, ply uptil the nearby city of Vasco da Gama, approx four kilometres away, and also stop at the closer Chicalim bus stop, about 1.5 kms from the airport. Local mini-buses connect both Vasco da Gama and Chicalim to the airport. Bus scheduling (as well as road engineering) may be complicated by the bunching of flights in the afternoons at the airport, causing unnecessary peak and off-peak conditions.

Pre-paid taxis are available from the airport, but these tend to be higher-priced than in the rest of India, in part, due to a supposed lack of return fares for the taxis. Alongside is a photo showing the rates approved for pre-paid taxis, as of February 2006. These may based on standard routes which may be amenable to shortening by cab-drivers through their knowledge of the innumerable short-cuts in Goa.

Railway tracks of the Indian Railways (not the Konkan Railway, which also run through Goa in a rough "T" alignment), pass right in front of the airport. The nearest station is at Vasco da Gama city, about four kilometres away. Mormugao Port, which is showing signs of having a growing interest in luxury liners arriving there, is located about five kilometres away. For long, this region had the distinction of co-locating Goa's main port, its airport and an important rail-head not to mention a sizeable military base.

But with the Konkan Railways shifting the focus of arrivals and departures to Madgaon or Margao in South Goa, Thivim or Tivim in North Goa, and Karmali station near state-capital Panaji, the situation as far as rail connectivity goes is changing for Goa. Nearby Vasco da Gama continues to be an important railway station for passengers travelling to Bangalore, and other South Indian destinations.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that Goa's policy makers are not in much of a position to influence the direction which a key economic activity like civil aviation can take. The unique possibility of a 21st century aviation-centric "city"-state (leaving aside, perhaps, the building of airliners) may be rather remote for the state's leadership to contemplate and pursue. The state is struggling to catch the wave of low cost domestic aviation which is already covering India. It is likely to be unprepared to catch the next wave of low cost transcontinental air travel that is gathering strength beyond the horizon. A suitable policy prescription in the national context may be the need of the hour for Goa.

Airlines and destinations

• Air Deccan (Bangalore, Dehli, Hyderabad, Mumbai)
• Air India (Dubai, Kuwait, Mumbai)
• Air Sahara (Delhi, Mumbai)
• Condor Airlines (Frankfurt, Munich) [starts November, 2006]
• GoAir (Mumbai)
• Indian (Bangalore, Calicut, Chennai, Delhi, Kochi, Kuwait, Mumbai)
• Jet Airways (Bangalore, Mumbai)
• Kingfisher Airlines (Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai)
• Spicejet (Delhi, Mumbai)
• SriLankan Airlines (Colombo)

Many charter airlines such as Excel and Monarch operate into Goa on a seasonal basis. Charter flights are available to and from many UK and European destinations, as well as Israel and Russia.

World Aero Data

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