Spatial structure of airports network in India

Abstract

The growth of air transportation in India, caused by the economic boom in the 2010s, led to the need for the reconstruction of old (brownfield) and the construction of new (greenfield) airports. In accordance with the UDAN regional air connectivity improvement program, implemented since 2017, it is planned to build 70 airports in new locations. There are 109 civil airports of common use. Information about airports that have already been built, are under construction and are being designed is provided. Despite the implementation of part of the UDAN program, it turned out that a number of newly built airports were insufficiently loaded, new ghost airports appeared that are not in demand among air passengers. The features of the location of the country‘s airport network, its density (the number of operating passenger airports per 100 thousand square kilometers) are analyzed. Differences in the size of the Umland of airports (the ground gravity zone of one airport; calculated as the area of the territory in thousand square meters km divided by the number of passenger airports with regular traffic) and the potential air passenger capacity of the territory gravitating towards them (the number of residents of the territory per 1 operating airport). According to these three parameters (the density of the network, the size of the Umland, the air passenger capacity of the territory), a comparison was made with the network of airports in Indonesia.