After 2 years: Ludhiana-Delhi air service from September 1

Bengaluru-based private airlines Jetsmart announced that it will start operations on the Ludhiana-Delhi route from Sahnewal airport beginning September 1.

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Bengaluru-based private airlines Jetsmart on Monday announced that it will start operations on the Ludhiana-Delhi route from Sahnewal airport beginning September 1. The airline will offer services twice a day on all days except Saturday and Sunday.

“The air connectivity from Ludhiana to Delhi was a long- pending demand of industrialists here. The duration of flight would be of 75 minutes,” said Angad Dhaliwal, business development head, Jetsmart. The airline will ply its eight-seater Beechcraft B200 King Air aircraft that has seven business class seats and one economy class.

While the development marks a reversal in fortunes for the airport, city residents are sceptical. Earlier, in 2010, Air India started an ATR aircraft from Ludhiana-Delhi but discontinued it in May 2014, citing erratic bookings, low passenger volume, inadequate facilities at the airport, among other reasons.

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The airport does not have night landing facility and a 1.5-km runway is too small for a big aircraft.

Spread over 12 acres, Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal in 2013 had, under ‘Mission Ludhiana’, announced an ambitious plan to develop an ‘Aero-City’ and expand Sanhewal airport.

“Within a year and a half, Ludhiana will witness landing of Boeings with full fledged international airport,” he had said. In May 2014, the then Public works development (PWD) minister Sharanjit Singh Dhillon announced again that the airport will be expanded. Two days later, Air India began withdrawing its service gradually.

Divya Goyal

Divya Goyal is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express, based in Punjab. Her interest lies in exploring both news and feature stories, with an effort to reflect human interest at the heart of each piece. She writes on gender issues, education, politics, Sikh diaspora, heritage, the Partition among other subjects. She has also extensively covered issues of minority communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She also explores the legacy of India's partition and distinct stories from both West and East Punjab. She is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, the most revered government institute for media studies in India, from where she pursued English Journalism (Print). Her research work on “Role of micro-blogging platform Twitter in content generation in newspapers” had won accolades at IIMC. She had started her career in print journalism with Hindustan Times before switching to The Indian Express in 2012. Her investigative report in 2019 on gender disparity while treating women drug addicts in Punjab won her the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2020. She won another Laadli for her ground report on the struggle of two girls who ride a boat to reach their school in the border village of Punjab. ... Read More

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