History
The Juhu Aerodrome functioned as Mumbai's sole airport until 1942. Due to operational constraints imposed by its low-level location and proximity to the Arabian Sea coastline making it vulnerable during the monsoon season, a move further inland became necessary.
In 1942 a bigger airfield was set up at Santa Cruz, which was also home to several RAF Squadrons from 1942 to 1947 during World War II . The Airport covered an area of about 2,400 acres (1307 hectares) and initially had three runways. The apron existed on the south side of runway 09/27, and the area, referred to today as the "Old Airport", houses, among others, maintenance hangars of Air India, Air Works India and MIAL's General Aviation Terminal.
By 1946, when the RAF began the process of handing over the airfield to the Director General of Civil Aviation for Civil operations, two old abandoned hangars of the Royal Air Force had been converted into a terminal for passenger traffic. One hangar was used as a domestic terminal and the other for international traffic. It had counters for customs and immigration checks on either side and a lounge in the centre. Air India handled its passengers in its own terminal adjoining the two hangars. In its first year, it handled six civilian services a day. Traffic at the airport increased after Karachi was partitioned to Pakistan and as many as 40 daily internal and foreign services operated by 1949. By June 1948, a new terminal building and apron had been constructed across the runway 09/27, which was used by Air India for its maiden international flight to London. Named after the neighbourhood in which it stood and initially under the aegis of the Public Works Department, the new airport was subsequently run by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. After a major fire gutted the Santa Cruz terminal in 1979, a temporary departure extension or "Gulf Terminal" became functional in October that year.
Santa Cruz, despite several extensions, had insufficient operational capacity. The Tata committee, set up in 1967 to examine the issues, had recommended the construction of a new international terminal to meet the requirements of traffic in the seventies. The Santa Cruz terminal was to be used for domestic traffic alone. The International Airport Authority of India, which was set up in 1972, started planning the construction of a new terminal building for handling international passenger traffic, to be completed by 1981. Accordingly construction of the new International airport at Sahar to the north-east of Santacruz was taken up at an estimated cost of Rs. 11 crores.
Read more about this topic: Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport
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