Goemkarponn Desk
PANAJI: Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said that said international flights will start operating to, from Mopa some time soon.
“Till last year, bus and train services were available to residents of Pernem taluka. Now, air service has also been made available to them. International flights will also start operating from Manohar International airport,” said Sawant
May 2023 figures show that Dabolim airport handled 585,182 domestic passengers and 34,971 international passengers.
However, MIA handled 335,265 passengers. The two airports together handled 920,447 domestic passengers in May 2023.
There are nine destinations which are connected to both Dabolim and MIA. These are Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune.
Amritsar, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore, Dehradun, Jaipur, Nagpur, Nashik, Patna, Ranchi, Varanasi and Vizag are connected only to MIA, while Indore, Chandigarh, Mysore, Kochi, Raipur and Surat are connected only to Dabolim.
Work on the airport began in right earnest following the state government’s agreement with the developers, GMR Goa International Airport Ltd (GGIAL) in November 2016, a subsidiary of airports-to-energy conglomerate GMR Group that also operates the airports in Delhi and Hyderabad, among others
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The first phase of the project has been completed under the public-private partnership (PPP) model at a revised sanctioned project cost of `2,870 crore.
Goa’s primary airport in Dabolim belongs to the Indian Navy. Being a defence property attached to INS Hansa, the country’s biggest naval airbase, it has constraints of time slots that restrict the operation of domestic and international flights to and from the airport to specified hours
