Only one airport, only one flight

THE FORMER FRENCH colony,  now a Union Territory of India,  Pondicherry,  has its own small domestic airport. It is just over 3 miles from the city centre (as the crow flies). However, because of the traffic and the winding nature of our route, it took almost 30 minutes to reach the airport.   

 

After we had booked a flight from Pondicherry to Bangalore,  our daughter, who had taken the same flight twelve months earlier,  warned us that the airport at Pondicherry had limited resources but no refreshment facilities.

 

Prior to arriving at the airport,  I wondered if it would be even more rudimentary than the tiny airport at Khandla (in Kutch, Gujarat). Even that airport has a refreshment kiosk. With these thoughts in mind, and armed with a bag full of snacks and soft drinks, we headed off to Pondicherry Airport.

 

To my great surprise (and relief), we found that the passenger terminal at Pondicherry Airport is housed in a large, airy, well-ventilated, modern, comfortable, cylindrical building. And it has a refreshment kiosk, which sells only soft drinks.

 

The airport was first opened in 1989, and used for two years. However, lack of financial success caused it to be closed in 1991. After reconstructing the airport and its runways, it was reopened in 2012. The new terminal was inaugurated in 2013. Currently, Indigo Airlines operates flights to and from this airport. There is one daily flight : Bangalore to Pondicherry to Hyderabad, and another from Hyderabad to Bangalore via Pondicherry.  We took the latter. The propellor plane on which we flew was an ATR 72-600 (built by a French company, ATR), which can carry 78 passengers.

 

What I particularly liked about the airport is that instead of reaching the aircraft by an air-bridge or on a bus  we simply walked across the tarmac from the terminal to the ‘plane.

 

As we drove from Pondicherry to the airport, Shiva (our taxi driver) casually remarked about Pondicherry:

“Only one airport,  only one flight.”