Indira Gandhi International Airport
Transportation has evolved quite a lot in the millennia that mankind has walked the Earth. For a very long time, there was no real way to get from one place to another beyond simply walking there on your own two feet. Other forms of transportation developed – canoes on water, for instance, or the saddle for horseback riding – but perhaps nothing sums up the modern concept of transportation better than the modern airliner.
The reason, of course, that most people fly on airlines is that they're so fast - able to get you anywhere in the world for rarely more than a single day of travel. For most long trips - flying from Europe or America to India, for example - they're an absolute necessity. Now, why is that important? It's important because it changes the way we travel. Whereas a hundred and fifty years ago, traveling overseas would mean a voyage of months and stopovers at major port cities, a voyage today means a voyage of hours and stopovers at major airports.
Airports can often seem like nothing more than nuisances - just crowded places to switch planes or to pick up baggage, busy whirls of humanity that can be difficult and stressful to negotiate. Perhaps what is needed, though, is not a change of venue so much as a change of perspective. After all, airports are like cities - each is a self-sufficient entity composed of a mass of people, and no two are exactly alike. If you look at an airport as part of the experience of traveling, you may actually be able to get something out of even your time spent in airports, and will have a far more enjoyable vacation as a result.
The Indira Gandhi International Airport makes that goal much easier to reach. The chief airport of New Delhi, India, the Indira Gandhi International Airport is one of the main international gateways into the ancient and culture rich nation of India, and a crossroads of humanity. Here at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, travelers meet people from all over the world, in an international hum of a dozen languages. This is truly a place where humanity as a species becomes humanity as a people, one mass of like beings, with the rigid separations of language and ethnicity fading, if only for a moment, amongst the constant movement and crowds of the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
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The Indira Gandhi International Airport has a lot of unique markers that make it what it is and are a part of that list of details that make it unique among world-class airports. There are a lot of mile markers in the history of India as well - not only the Indira Gandhi International Airport itself, but the entire country. Even the namesake is historic - the entire Indira Gandhi International Airport is named after the famous Indira Gandhi, the female prime minister of India from 1966 until her assassination in 1984. She was India's first and only female prime minister, and is still revered by her people as a great and wise leader. It's fitting, then, that one of the city's most important features is named after her
Another distinguishing feature of the Indira Gandhi International Airport is that it is the first airport in all of India to simultaneously run two runways at once - a process begun on the thirty-first of March in 2006. The double runway system, managed by a CAT III-B Instrument Landing System - the only one of its kind in south Asia - was first tested and opened on that day when a test run involving a SpiceJet plan landing and a Jet Airways plane taking off was performed successfully. That double runway system effectively doubles the capacity of the airport, making it a super power in terms of transportation capacity and the ability to move freight and passengers out of India's heavily populated capital city.
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The Indira Gandhi International Airport is a massive conglomeration of runways, taxiways, roads, concourses, terminals, communications centers, restaurants, car rentals, and nearly everything you might expect to find in a small city, let alone an airport. In fact, airport management is currently working to expand the airport into an "aeropolis" - the airport equivalent of a metropolis. See more on the future of the Indira Gandhi International Airport online for more details on some of those plans.
The Indira Gandhi International Airport has two runways. One of them, the main runway, is 3810 meters long and capable of landing any aircraft built by the hand of man. The second, at 2813 meters, is still more than large enough to handle nearly any aircraft. Both are surfaced in asphalt and handle hundreds of takeoffs and landings every day. From the runways, planes taxi into the Indira Gandhi International Airport proper, where they are serviced by world class air mechanics, refueled, loaded, unloaded, and everything else expected from a high quality world airport.
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Airport managers at the Indira Gandhi International Airport have big plans in store for the airport, and the next few decades may well see major changes in the overall plan, design, and experience of the airport. The Indira Gandhi International Airport is already one of the largest and most often used airport in all of southern Asia, and the changes - if enacted as planned - would quite possibly make it the largest and most used airport in all of Asia. This is fitting for the second most populous nation in the most populous continent in the world.
Several more terminals are being added onto the Indira Gandhi International Airport as part of the new construction plans, of which we'll talk more about shortly. One of the main and perhaps most visionary new goals of the new construction is the idea of turning the Indira Gandhi International Airport into an "aeropolis," which we mentioned early. These plans, if enacted - and they likely will be, and relatively soon - would allow the Indira Gandhi International Airport to become a "city to itself," according to airport officials. It would handle, if completed correctly, over one hundred million passengers every year, with five hundred check-in counters, two hundred aerobridges, one hundred and fifty immigration counters, restaurants, shops, parks, malls, and everything else one would expect a full-scale city to have. All these things will work together to form the single large entity of the Indira Gandhi International Airport and to give the place its signature look and feel.
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Another major component of the new building progress at the Indira Gandhi International Airport is the construction of the new terminals, which will allow the airport to handle more plane traffic and offload more planes at any given moment. Perhaps the most important - and the most impressive - of these new terminals and, indeed, any of the existing ones, is Terminal 3, which will cater to both domestic and international passengers from all over the country and all over the world. This terminal will boast one hundred and thirty check-in counters, and would handle, by itself, over thirty-five million passengers every year. Terminal 3 would be built on two tiers, with the top being used for departures and the bottom for arrivals. Transportation systems, including the Delhi metro and a six lane highway, would lead directly out to Terminal 3, and that terminal would become the central point in the airport's overall structure and layout.
Airport officials are currently predicting completion of Terminal 3, if everything goes as planned, by 2010 - just in time, in fact, for the Commonwealth Games to be held in that year. The building's overall design would be in an enormous U shape, with a modular design to allow for fast and efficient construction and ease of maintenance.
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Perhaps one of the most spectacular new additions at the Indira Gandhi International Airport will be the absolutely massive new runway - constructed out of asphalt, this third runway would be 4400 meters long - that's six hundred meters longer than the airport's current main runway, and would be one of the largest and longest runways in all of Asia. That triple runway capacity would allow the Indira Gandhi International Airport to move more than seventy-five more flights - every hour. That new flight capacity, obviously, would make New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport even more vital to the city and the country's economic well being. Seventy-five new flights every hour means hundreds of tons of cargo and sometimes thousands of new passengers - every hour. The benefits this would bring into the city and the nation of India through the Indira Gandhi International Airport are almost inconceivable.
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India is a very large and diverse country. As a result, much of the travel throughout the interior of the nation occurs by air. For this reason, much of the travel from the rest of India into New Delhi comes in through the Indira Gandhi International Airport, the largest airport in New Delhi and one of the largest in all of south Asia. There are currently two terminals, of which the first is divided into two sections. The third terminal, to be finished in 2010, will take a large chunk of the current percentage of passengers through its doors, but currently everyone passes through terminals 1A, 1B, or 2.
Terminal 1A is used by Air India and Alliance Air, which is a southern Asian airline, and caters to a large number of domestic flights from throughout India and neighboring nations in southern Asia. Terminal 1B is also primarily Asian airlines, including Jet Lite, IndiGo Airlines, and SpiceJet, servicing countries and passengers in India's general geographic vicinity.
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New Delhi and the Indira Gandhi International Airport are also major destinations from global travel from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Most long range flights are routed through Terminal 2, and many mainstream global airlines have taken up residence there, including Air France, American Airlines, Aeroflot, Iberia Airlines, Japan Airlines, and Lufthansa.
Tourism is one of India's more profitable exports, so you can see how much the Indira Gandhi International Airport brings into the country in terms of tourism profits. As a main portal into the country from anywhere outside India, the Indira Gandhi International Airport is a major economic force not only in New Delhi, but also in all of India. It's a mark of how much Indira Gandhi herself was respected that such a prominent and important city feature would be named after her.
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If you're considering taking a trip to India and passing through the Indira Gandhi International Airport, how should you prepare? The simplest way to get the latest and most up to date information is simply to go online and check out Indira Gandhi International Airport's website. You can find everything from car rental information to floor maps to reservations, and can use all of that information to help you plan the best possible vacation upon arriving in New Delhi.
Whatever you do, and however you do it, you can always be assured of a better experience - and often better deals - simply by doing some basic research beforehand and educating yourself on the situation. Take a look at your options, and see what seems like it may work best for you. Read up on India and Indian culture, and on New Delhi specifically. There's more to a great vacation than just buying plane tickets, and if you play your cards right, the Indira Gandhi International Airport may very well be part of that amazing experience. There's only one sure way to find out - start booking a flight today and see what India - one of the oldest civilizations on the face of the Earth - has to offer you.
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