Soft idlis and smooth takeoffs

The aroma of piping hot idli and sambhar greets you at the departure area as you prepare to board your flight at Hyderabad International Airport. This traditional south Indian favourite sells briskly — nearly 1,500 plates a day — at the Idli Factory eatery inside this swanky airport.

With an aircraft landing or taking off every seven minutes, nearly 7.2 million passengers travelled through this busy airport last fiscal.

Alongside the demand for improved connectivity, less transit time and amenities such as a smoking zone and relaxation lounge, many travellers look forward to sampling the hot idli and the city's famous ‘Karachi biscuit' sold here.

Linking the smaller cities

The three-year-old airport aims to grow by servicing air traffic from tier-II centres.

Santosh Bhat, an engineer in his mid-20s, is from Mangalore and working at a technology firm in Hyderabad for the past six years.

With direct flights in operation, he can reach his hometown in one-and-a-half hours. With no train connection between the two cities and deterred by the prospect of a gruelling 18-hour road travel, earlier he was forced to spend an entire day transiting through airports in neighbouring cities/States.

The reduced travel time comes as a boon to the large number of people, including many top corporate executives, travelling between these cities, as we found out during a visit organised for journalists by the GMR-promoted Rajiv Gandhi Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (RGHIAL).

We, however, had to fly via Bangalore, as the recently-launched lone direct flight was full. Abdul Qadir, a septuagenarian co-passenger from Mangalore, told us that he too couldn't get a ticket for the direct flight. (Our group of journalists, however, got the direct flight on the return trip.)

Vikram Jaisinghani, Chief Executive Officer of RGHIAL, says such routes are a success due to the strategic location of the airport, infrastructure availability and the untapped demand from tier-2 centres such as Mangalore, Pune, Aurangabad, Tirupati, Nagpur, Goa, Indore and Bhubaneswar.

Used to covering seaport traffic on my regular beat, I inadvertently asked about the number of “million tonnes of passengers” handled by the airport, only to be gently corrected by a genial executive, who said: “We can handle 12 million individual customers in a special way.”

Reduced travel time

Explaining the advantages conferred by the airport's strategic location, he said, “Here we are central, and we are south. That is helping us. We can cover almost 19 centres in one-and-a-half hours. The airport offers good infrastructure and a great experience for passengers. What was missing was the connectivity. For this, we worked with airlines.”

The airport is emerging a hub for most of these 19 centres, with passengers on connecting flights making use of its lounge facilities.

Moreover, as Jaisinghani points out, travel to, say, Kolkata from Mangalore takes 8.35 hours via Mumbai, and 7.45 hours via Bangalore. This reduces to 6.45 hours via Hyderabad.

Similarly, Mangalore-Delhi travel takes 7.2 hours via Hyderabad, as against 8.2 via Mumbai, and 9.35 via Bangalore.

Heightened passenger services

Bhat recalls returning to Hyderabad from a neighbouring airport in October 2010, where his flight was delayed by an hour and he had to wait two-and-a-half hours more before boarding. Restless with the waiting, he and the friend accompanying him were further annoyed to discover that they had to exit the airport for a smoke and re-enter only after going through another security check. Hyderabad's airport terminal, on the other hand, boasts smoking lounges for passengers.

“If you say you are an international airport, facilities such as these count,” Bhat insists.

But if it's some action, rather than a quiet smoke, that passengers look for while they wait in between flights, the airport has nothing less than ‘go-karting' on offer for them!

A major factor in customer satisfaction when it comes to air travel is the ease and promptness of baggage handling. At Hyderabad international airport, the first bag arrives at the conveyor in three minutes and the last within about 18 minutes, says a commercial operations executive. It depends on how big the aircraft is, he adds.

Geared for an emergency

Airports often make news for all the wrong reasons such as a bird hit or a not-so-smooth emergency landing. What doesn't show up in the headlines are the many potential disasters that were averted thanks to the airport's preparedness.

Hyderabad airport in its three years has thrice handled the A-380 aircraft. The first was a ferry flight, while the other two were emergency landings due to a medical requirement and a technical snag respectively.

An A-380 requires a long and wide runway to land. On a tour of the airport's airside operations, we learnt about the emergency runway that lies parallel to the regular 4.26-km runway and is longer by 135 metres to help land large aircraft such as the A-380.

During the peak morning hours, the airport witnesses a landing or takeoff every 2-3 minutes and is equipped with 10 exit taxiways, of which four are rapid exit taxiways.

(The International Civil Aviation Organisation defines a rapid exit taxiway as one that connects the runway at an acute angle, enabling landing aircraft to switch off at higher speeds than those possible on a regular exit taxiway.)

Vehicles such as the bus that transports passengers or crew to the aircraft cannot exceed speeds of 5-20 kmph near the taxiway and only certified ground handlers are permitted in this area, the airside operations executive told us.

It was evening when we completed our tour of the airport, and we were transported back to the terminal building. The flashing lights from flights, the flurry of trolley movements, the buzz from buses ferrying passengers from the departure gates signalled the evening peak hour at the airport.

Above the fully illuminated terminal building rose the air traffic control room overseeing the rush-hour operations. A busy day had come to an end. But another busy night was just beginning...

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