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How to go about having commercial flights into Rourkela

August 18th. 2010, 11:39pm

The best way to get commercial flights to Rourkela is to make a case with the various private airlines. If any one of them agrees, the rest regarding what authorizations would be needed to enable the planes to fly to the SAIL airport in Rourkela would not be hard. Couple of years back the then DM of Sundergarh was very close to convincing Air Deccan to fly to Rourkela. One needs to get in touch with the current DM and revive that process.

Until the Jharsuguda airport becomes functional commercial flights to this airport is sorely needed. Even after that, enough traffic now may result in commercial flights continuing their presence in the airport. So in a sense this is the last chance (for 10-15 years) for Rourkela people to have commercial flight connectivity.

5 Responses to “How to go about having commercial flights into Rourkela”

Debi P. Sarangi Says:
August 20th, 2010 at 3:17 am

I would like to repeat my earlier proposal here. The Odisha state government has a great role to be played in this field. Odisha frankly is not a very wealthy state where people have the liberty to opt for an air travel unless compelled to do so. Therefore to start the air travel economy from the grass root level you need to make the service affordable. It can be done only by the state govt. on a break even basis. No private airline company is going to do a charity of starting the intra state flights at the cost of incurring loss. The model adopted by the govt. for all the industries at the initial stage of the independence. Steel industry started massively by GOI, although TATAs had a plant at Tatanagar(Jamshedpur). Air India was nationalised by GOI for its expansion and taking it over from the TATAs. Even the travel industry(Bus Service) is largely supported by the govt. operation although a lot of private players are there.
The state govt. should start a airline of a 20 seater or two initially operating from Rourkela-Bhubaneswar, Keonjhar-Bhubaneswar, Rayagada-Bhubaneswar and of course Rasagovindpur-Bhubaneswar segments. All these places have airstrips and that could be developed to accommodate small 20 seater flights initially.I am sure if the charges would be affordable, you can’t control the rush.

Finally Govt. of Odisha please, please start a state aviation company “Kalinga Airlines” (reviving the erstwhile indigenous airline company of great Biju Babu with 7 Dakota flights)for the intra state air travel in Odisha.

Ranjan Nayak Says:
August 21st, 2010 at 4:14 am

Why govt? Why not somebody from ODISHA? When it comes to business/entrepreneurship we’re always dependent upon some outsider/govt. Do we end with the statement that Odias don’t have good entrepreneurial skills. It’s high time that ODISHA have some homegrown entrepreneurs. If Biju babu can built one good airline at that point of time why can’t new breed odias can develop a low cost airline at this point of time.

pila Says:
August 21st, 2010 at 7:20 am

one can find many type of dariyadil insaan from rourkela,rklts who have prepared the petition for jeypore,jsg and bbsr,but where is our rourkela???because of so many dariyadilli insans airport is not possible n rourkela upto 20 years

Dillip Kumar Mohanty Says:
December 18th, 2010 at 2:50 pm